Antelope Hunt Montana Style, 2002

January 25, 2015 12:10 am My son Adam turned 12 this year and it would be his first year to be able to hunt big game in Montana. We applied for antelope tags and drew them in the 700 area of eastern Montana. A friend had hunted out of Broadus before. He is a pilot too and flies a Cessna 180. And so Adam and I and John and his friend Bruce took off in our planes in October for southeastern Montana loaded for antelope. We landed at Broadus and Glen Wash provided us with an old Suburban to hunt with. Within walking distance of the Broadus airport there is a motel and restaurant too. We hunted for a day on a block of BLM land that John had hunted before but after a day of seeing more hunters than antelope we decided to change hunting areas. I knew a rancher between Miles City and Broadus and gave him a call from the motel that night. He invited us to his ranch and we showed up the next morning in our old airport Suburban. John, the rancher, told us to jump into his 4-door pickup and he’d show us around his place. And so he did. By early afternoon we had filled our tags with antelope bucks including Adam’s first big game animal; a nice 12” buck that he shot with a .243. Later that morning I shot a nice 14” heavy-horned buck with my custom .257 Weatherby chambered rifle. And John filled his tag right after lunch with another buck. There is a butcher shop in Broadus that will process game animals overnight. We took our bucks in about 5:00 in the afternoon and at 9:00 the next morning we picked up our cut, wrapped, frozen and boxed antelope. The butcher had even cut the horns off of the antelope for us and we soon had the planes loaded with our gear and headed west. The weather was fine for our entire trip and the headwinds were not even too strong on the return flight home. In all we enjoyed our flight and hunting trip in the Big Sky state. And flying to Broadus in 3 plus hours from northwestern Montana sure beat a 10 – 12 hour drive.