Fresh off her U.S. House election loss, Jillian Balow trekked her 5-foot-1-inch frame over nearly a mile of fallen trees into a lodgepole pine basin, rested her compound bow against a tree and waited.
The second day of bow-hunt season dawned, leaking sunlight through the pines in Elk Hunt Area 15 near Saratoga. The prior night’s rain diffused scents of pine needle and loam.
Balow had looked forward to her second-ever bow elk hunt since applying for the tag in May, the same month she registered to run for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat.
Nine other Republicans filed to run for that same seat in what became one of the most brutal and expensive statewide campaigns in Wyoming memory.
Spending about 5% as much as the GOP nominee, Secretary of State Chuck Gray, and 3% as much as second-place candidate Steve Friess, Balow finished fourth in the Aug. 18 Republican primary.
A former superintendent of public instruction, she stumped hard this summer for public-lands conservation and thoughtful governance. She toured Wyoming and shook its myriad hands.
She also witnessed intense online vitriol and some “nasty” incidents on the campaign trail. And in some of those moments, she visualized a quiet morning on the mountain, Balow told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
“Throughout the campaign it was a mental counterbalance,” Balow said of her planned hunt.
Campaigns are fast-paced and overstimulating.
Hunting is the opposite, Balow noted.
“You have to be in the moment. You have to be very focused, very still,” she said. “You don’t have electronics, you don’t have any other distractions. Your only job is to listen and look.”
The forces of a campaign are big, but not as immense as Wyoming’s wilderness and the whims of nature, which can humble anyone, she said.
Into The Cathedral
On public land at about 9,000 feet elevation, Balow and her husband, John, hiked the still-dark labyrinth of fallen trees with their headlamps beaming.
Her husband settled into his own stakeout about 200 yards away, bugling in sparse intervals. She sat on a log in her triangle of deadfall and watched for a shot.
Every sound crisped into being. Chipmunks chattered. Twigs snapped. Lodgepole pines swayed.
Balow was “really learning what stillness is. Listening and watching for just one little hint. Believe it or not, it takes practice, because our world is really busy,” she said.
She saw a velvety movement behind a tree, the twitch of ears.
“The crazy thing is, you’d think these huge animals, you’d hear them,” she reflected. “But they’re just ghosts.”
It was a bull elk, probably weighing close to 500 pounds, she said.
Balow got into position and suppressed that familiar rush of adrenaline that cheated her out of a harvest during her first bow hunt in 2024.
The bull faced her from about 40 yards away, its ears protruding from either side of the tree. Had he turned to the right, the downed trees would have blocked her shot. If he turned to the left, Balow knew, she’d have a window.
The bull turned left. Everything came together in that moment.
“If you’re a bow hunter especially, (there are) so many split seconds where it depends on practice, strategy, and pure luck,” she said.
She drew and fired into the elk’s lung. Then she sounded her “Hoochie Mama” brand cow call to let her husband know she’d downed a bull.
That call isn’t useful for summoning animals because the rut hadn’t begun yet, said Balow. But it served to call her husband over to help her quarter the elk and pack it out – on foot – from the bowl-shaped recess in the terrain, she added.
“It was a hard haul,” Balow reflected.
The deadfall strewed every step. She said she carried her own weight’s worth of elk on her back.
“Oddly,” she added, she and her husband ran into another hunter they knew, out in the wilderness, and he helped carry the meat out of the basin.
They put the quarters on ice, brought them to town and took them to the processor.
“We’ve never been trophy hunters,” said Balow. “We absolutely fill our freezer and are grateful for every bite.”
Roots
Balow pointed to her Wyoming roots throughout the campaign, noting she was the only candidate in that race who was both a native of the Cowboy State and had experience running a statewide office.
Those same roots brought her perspective in defeat, she said.
“A lot of parts of the campaign did not feel good. But every single day, in every single community, I met or reconnected with wonderful people across the state,” Balow said. “And by far, the goodness of Wyoming outshone the craziness of the campaign trail.”
But First, Let’s Fish
The privilege of the elk hunt is also an anthem of that goodness, she said.
Even before her Sept. 2 elk hunt Balow plunged into the wilderness as soon as she caught up on sleep after the election.
She rode 11 miles on horseback into the mountains with a friend group of eight other women for a four-day fishing trip.
The HuntNDivas group, which encourages and equips women for outdoors experiences, gathered “ladies from all over” for the trip, Balow said.
She called the fishing and camping trip “post-primary election therapy,” in a later Facebook post.
Balow returned home for one day, washed some laundry, repacked, and drove straight to her elk tag area with her husband and her bow, she said.
What’s Next?
Balow has had a busy decade.
She led the state’s education department from 2015 to 2022, leading public schools through their COVID years with comparably shorter closures than many other states.
She took the Virginia equivalent of that job in early 2022. Balow described the move on the campaign trail this year, saying Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked her to “do in Virginia what you did in Wyoming.”
She resigned in 2023.
Balow has since run a strategic consulting business, which she said Wednesday mostly gives education consulting.
“But I’m thinking about taking on some new projects a little bit outside the scope of education,” she said. “Still focused on strategy, and relationship-building.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
