Sandsberry: Elk rumors are likely just that

YAKIMA, Wash. — The rumors were flying during and after this fall’s elk hunting season in the game management units (GMUs) west of Yakima. With the Muckleshoot tribe having announced its hunters would be hunting deer and elk in nine Yakima-area GMUs, a lot of non-tribal hunters had a justification ready in the event they came up empty.

It must be the Indians’ fault, right? Those tribal guys must have just come in and cleaned out all the elk, right?

Certainly that was the popular rumor.

I talked to one hunter who said the men in his hunting party on Cleman Mountain were told by a game warden that Muckleshoot tribal hunters had taken some ridiculously high number of elk from that GMU — something like 400.

Well, for one thing, it wasn’t a state game warden who said that; I’ve talked to the only two WDFW guys who work that area and it was neither of them, and besides that, the state guys don’t have any harvest numbers yet from the Muckleshoots because those figures haven’t been posted. But four hundred from one GMU? Maybe four. If that many.

I talked to a hunter from Prosser, John Jeskey, who said he hunted in the Wildcat area north of Rimrock Lake and said, “I didn’t see an elk for three and a half days. And I didn’t hear a shot. I didn’t run into anyone that was camping up there that saw an elk.” He told me he also ran into a group of six hunters he’d seen up there last year, when that same group had taken four spikes; this year, they told Jeskey, they got nothing.

Jeskey also told me he’d heard the same kind of rumor that had been circulating in other areas: that a band of Muckleshoot hunters had come in and taken hundreds of elk, just basically taken everything with an antler or without.

Ridiculous. And simply not true.

“The rumor mill is terrible,” said Rich Mann, who heads up the WDFW’s enforcement division in the region that includes Yakima. “I’m not sure what it’s based on one of the time. One animal (killed) turns into five and two tribal harvests turn into 15 and 20. The stories get blown up a lot bigger than at least what the data shows.”

And, of course, there are the stories about how the WDFW are in cahoots with the tribes basically to cheat non-tribal hunters out of a fair shake. WDFW enforcement officer Alan Baird was working those Yakima GMUs during elk season and heard some good ones — in addition to the ones about how the Muckleshoots were killing off elk by the hundreds.

“Guys were saying, ‘Yeah, we were sitting around the campfire and we saw this black helicopter come over and we know it was you guys herding elk out of the area so the hunters can’t get them,’ and that kind of deal. I’m going, really guys? Black helicopters? You obviously haven’t been reading the paper about our budget problems.”

As for why so many hunters weren’t seeing elk and where the elk were, well, that depends on who you talk to. I talked to a guy who guides hunters drawn for special branch-antler bull permits and he said they saw more elk where they were hunting than they usually do. (I won’t say where that is; if a guy’s got a good hunting spot, I’m not about to give it away.) I talked to other hunters who said they saw lots of elk for a day or two and then didn’t see anything after that.

And there were so many drainages that were either closed off and inaccessible because of last year’s high-water runoffs — Milk Creek, some of the Little Rattlesnake, bottom part of Rock Creek — that I’m guessing after the first couple of days of gunfire, the elk figured out pretty quickly where the people weren’t.

As for the idea that Muckleshoot hunters took 400 elk out of Cleman Mountain, or 300 out of the Wildcat, or 200 out of the Little Naches, well, I’ll consider that nonsense until somebody proves otherwise. (And I’m confident it would be easier to prove the existence of the Tooth Fairy. Ya can’t prove what just ain’t true.)

Not convinced? I was hearing the same “where’s the elk?” laments in the fall of 2010, and the Muckleshoots had already begun hunting these GMUs then; it just wasn’t common knowledge last year like it was this fall. If more non-tribal hunters had known about the Muckleshoots’ activity, you can bet those rumors would have been flying then, too.

The Muckleshoots are very strict in their reporting requirements of their hunters, and they report their tribal harvest to the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. Those numbers won’t be available to the public for a few months or I’d include them here. But just take a glance at the actual figures from last year:

Non-tribal hunters — we’ll call that “the state” — took 115 bull elk (most of them spikes) out of the Little Naches GMU last year; the Muckleshoots took 15. With cows, the state took 108 and the tribe took two. In the Taneum, the state took 56 bulls and 63 cows; the tribe took seven and zero. The Muckleshoots took six elk in the Bethel GMU; the state took 100.

Throughout the Region 3 GMUs, non-tribal hunters took 870 bulls and 722 cows — nearly 1,600 total. The Muckleshoots took 34.

Still believe the rumors?

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com. This story was previously posted in the Yakima Herald-Republic’s Out There blog.