As if hunting elk in Wyoming’s high country isn’t already tough enough, Cade Cole took it up several notches by venturing into the mountains without food or water to live off the land.
His first meal, after 40 hours, was a squirrel he shot with his traditional recurve bow and roasted over a campfire that he started without matches.
He pursued elk for days in late October. He was often above timberline in the mountains near Dubois, where temperatures plunged into the low 20s.
Singling out a bull among a herd of dozens of elk was hard. And creeping to within recurve bow range — no more than 25 yards, was even harder.
Cole pulled it off, killing a five-point bull with a 15-yard shot, and finally returning home to Crowheart, Wyoming, after five days in the backcountry with only two horses and a mule for company.
Getting Back To The Roots
That bare-bones, primitive approach is all about “getting back to the roots of hunting,” he told Cowboy State Daily.
“If you look at the technology and the equipment that everybody’s using for hunting now — the gear, the clothing, the weapons, it’s so advanced,” he said.
“Over the years, I just started taking less and less with me,” he said. “For this trip, I took no food, no water, no containers. Just my knife, my bow and the clothes I was wearing.”
He also rode his horse with no saddle, just a “bareback pad” that was more for the horse’s comfort than for his.
It’s similar to what Native Americans used for horseback riding, he said.
“You can hurt the horse by just strictly barebacking. It (the pad) takes a little bit of the point pressure from your individual bones off of the horse’s back, and distributes the weight more evenly,” Cole said.
He carried his arrows on his back, in a quiver he made from a coyote’s hide.
No Matches Allowed
To start fires, he used friction. Using a primitive device made from a bow-shaped stick and a string, he rapidly turned another stick, with one end placed against a flat piece of wood.
The resulting friction can produce enough heat to ignite material like dry grass. But on his first night of camping out on the ground, the grass he could scrounge was too wet to ignite.
So he went to bed with no fire, no dinner and only an elk hide to sleep under.
The next evening, he had better luck. He shot the squirrel earlier that day, and some lichen (tree moss) he found was dry enough to start a fire.
Squirrel Kidneys – It’s What’s For Dinner
Once he had a roaring blaze going, he roasted the squirrel and ate every edible part of it – including internal organs like the heart, liver and kidneys.
Not only are the organs tasty, they’re nutritionally vital, Cole said. Eating only red meat can cause a potentially fatal condition called “rabbit starvation.”
That’s because without fats and other nutrients, the body can’t properly process the protein in meat, so victims of the condition can be starving, even with full stomachs.
Primitive hunters knew to eat internal organs and other parts of game animals high in fat, and that’s how they survived, Cole said.
Dehydration Is The Worst
During his ultra-basic hunting trip, he drank directly from mountain streams. That carries the risk of contracting giardia, a parasitic disease that can cause severe illness.
Cole previously told Cowboy State Daily that he’s already had giardia twice and so has probably has built up immunity to it.
But he still recommends that other backcountry adventurers use some sort of water filtering device to avoid getting giardia in the first place.
The hunger and cold were brutal. But with streams difficult to find at times, dehydration was the hardest part of the hunt, Cole said.
“Dehydration is way worse than hunger. The muscle cramps, the headaches. The loss of cognitive function, because your brain actually uses a lot of water,” he said.
“It seems like your outer extremities, your feet and your hands, don’t work a well when you’re dehydrated,” he added.
Success At Last
Everything came together for Cole when he finally singled out a five-point bull elk.
Using willows and rocks as cover, he crept right up on the bull, which had bedded down.
Cole’s recurve bow doesn’t have any sights on it, like some modern compound bows do.
So shooting it accurately is a matter of instinct developed from countless hours of practice, he said.
“You just ‘see’ the arrow into the target,” he said. “You just visualize the shot, and after so many thousands of arrows, it happens.”
After the arrow pierced the bull’s vitals, it ran for about 300 yards before falling dead.
Then it was time to go about skinning and quartering the massive carcass, and loading the edible portions into the mule’s pack.
A lack of food was no longer a problem.
“I ate elk tenderloins that night, wrapped in the tripe, or stomach fat, from the elk,” he said. “It was all super-greasy and delicious. It was incredible.”
Sharing The Tradition With Others
Cole grew up in Texas, in a family with a long tradition of hunting.
He moved to Wyoming when he was 20 and dove ever-deeper into his passion for hunting and wilderness adventures.
Now 30, he makes a living by guiding hunting trips, and he also offers wilderness survival courses.
He doesn’t expect his hunting clients to take things to the primitive extremes that he does. But, watching the positive effects that getting away from the hustle of modern life has on other people is gratifying.
“It’s almost like a stress detox for them,” he said.
Being in the wild allows people to set aside their differences, he added.
“They all come together and just sit by the fire,” he said. “I think a lot of it has to do with rediscovering that connection with their basic humanity.”
Sharing It With The World
Cole made long-form videos of his 2024 elk hunt and a similarly primitive hunt in 2023. He’s published them on social media, and said they’ve become popular with a growing audience from all over the world.
It’s great to share his hunting experiences with people who are completely unfamiliar with such things, Cole said.
“We take for granted that almost everybody in Wyoming hunts or at least knows somebody who goes hunting. There’s a lot of places in the world where that’s abnormal,” he said.
To make the videos, he must go against his own primitive grain and embrace the latest technology, such as editing software.
The process is “miserable,” he said. “But the final product is awesome. It’s like, ‘Wow, look at this thing I’ve put together. It’s an artform, making a video like that.”
His younger sister, Carrissa Cole, who still lives in Texas, provides original soundtrack music.
He’s not sure what he’ll do for his next video – but it won’t be another primitive hunt. Packing a camera along and setting up shots disrupted the ambience, he said.
“You’re still a slave to technology at that point. You’re a slave to your camera,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
