Our First Hunting Experience!!

Well it has been a while since we last update our blog and quite a bit has happened!!! I turned 24 on the 16th and had a wonderful birthday!! I got the movie P.S. I Love You and lots of spoiling from Matt!! It is funny as you get older, at least for me, I lose interest in getting things for my birthdays! Really all I wanted was a day of relaxing and hanging out with Matt! Plus the movie............which I absolutely love!!

Next, Matt and I were able to go down to Utah a couple of weeks ago to celebrate my grandparents 60th anniversary as well as my grandma's 80th birthday!! It was a lot of fun to see family that I haven't seen for a long time! We really enjoyed ourselves and the little break from real life!
This is us at Cedar Breaks!
It was definately a beautiful ride home from Utah!
As many of you may not know, I had to become a resident of Idaho because I had to change my name from Allen to Cahoon. This was really hard for me because they make you give them your old license. So I had to say farewell to my Oregon license, that had a very nice picture which rarely happens on drivers licenses. Anywho, Matt took advantage of this because he is not a resident here so to get a hunting license and deer tag would cost him close to $600! So I was the one who got the hunting license and deer tag!! I must say I am pretty excited about this, I grew up with a dad who was way into hunting and I really like venison(deer meat). So Matt had spent all of this time planning our first hunting trip for this past weekend and we both were pretty excited!! I was able to get half of the day off so we could leave earlier, we checked the weather a million times and packed up and headed off!

Basically long story short, we got up to the mountains and set up camp and got to bed early. It rained that first night but not too bad and it made for a great morning!! It wasn't cold or anything, just really nice so we began our hunt! We were camped so high that really the only thing up that high were elk so we decided to hike down further into the woods to get to a lower point. We ended up hiking about 4 miles in, and I now know it is possible to be going up hill both ways...because we were!! Mind you this is the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states...true blue wild wilderness! After we had reached a fairly low point we heard this low rumbling noise, something I had never heard but Matt had once!! He immediately told me to get my rain gear on and within 15 seconds of putting on my rain gear we were standing in a huge monsoon type storm!! Rain and hail were falling so hard it felt like we were being pushed into the ground!! Now remember, we were 4 miles deep in forest in the top of the mountains, let me tell you that is not somewhere you want to be with thunder and lightening surrounding you!! Obviously we started to hurry back the way we came but every tiny little trail or path had now turned into a rushing river of water!! Within 2 minutes of the storm coming Matt and I were absolutely soaked, through our rain gear and everything!! It took us a good 2 hours or so to make it back, raining the whole way too! When we finally got back to camp we realized that we were actually blessed by not getting a deer while down there because it would have taken us a lot longer to get back if we had to hall a 100+ pound deer!! So we cleaned up camp and moved to a different area, set up camp, only to finish just in time for another storm!! This time we woke up to a few inches of snow......it was quite the experience!! We really did enjoy ourselves though if you would have asked us in the moment we probably would have said something different!!! Although we had no success we had a fun adventure and the general seasons have yet to open so we haven't lost hope yet!
Here we are on the first night...happy and dry!!
I wish I had a bunch of pictures to post but the only pictures we have are from the very first night before anything had happened...as you can imagine we weren't too thrilled about pulling the camera out anythime after that!!

These are the few pictures we got of where we were!!