2023 - Steamboat elk, a first for 16 year old Addison

October 31, 2023 • Voyageur Press

Addison traveled to Colorado with her father, Eric Sather, for her first elk hunt — and she didn’t have to wait long for success. On the very first morning, Addison harvested a bull elk near Steamboat Springs.

The plan was to hunt an area where Eric had hunted in previous years, but simply getting there brought the first challenge.

“We drove through snow on the way there,” Eric said. “I had a few nervous moments because they were talking anywhere from six to 18 inches. With 18 inches, we wouldn’t have been able to get up the mountain.”

“I was working on some backup plans,” he added, “but we got lucky, and it turned out to be six inches.”

Addison and Eric arrived the day before the season opened, giving them time to establish camp and scout the area.

“We set up our camp that first day and went out scouting,” Addison said. “We saw a few elk, and we prepared ourselves with a plan on where we were going the next day.”

Opening morning began early, with the two up at 5:30 a.m. and heading out on four-wheelers to their hunting spot.

“We sat on a hillside for about 40 minutes, and a few cows walked out,” Addison recalled. “I got my gun ready, and I was already shaking so bad.”

It wasn’t long before a bull appeared. Fortunately for Addison, it briefly stepped behind a tree.

“That gave me a little extra time to calm myself down and get ready for a good shot,” she said. “It walked out, and I pulled the trigger. My gun misfired!”

With the unexpected misfire, Addison tried to quickly chamber another round.

“I had my gloves on, so my dad had to reach around and help me,” she said. “By that time, the elk had spotted us.”

The bull was now looking directly at her.

“He was looking straight at me, so I shot it right in the chest and blew out one of the front shoulders,” Addison explained. “From there, he limped behind a tree, and I had more time to get another shell in.”

Then came another unexpected complication.

Addison fired again, but the stand supporting her gun broke.

“So my gun went flying one way, and my stand went flying the other way,” she said. “I thought I missed for sure.”

The bull disappeared into the woods and headed up another hill. Rather than immediately following, Addison and Eric waited about an hour to give the animal time to bed down.

“We walked over and found the elk about 40 yards from where my second shot was,” Addison said. “It was down, and I did hit him with that second shot.”

With the bull recovered, the next challenge began: getting the meat out of the mountains.

It took two trips to pack everything roughly three-quarters of a mile back to the four-wheelers — much of it uphill.

“We went up this really steep mountain,” Addison said. “It was so steep, we had to hold on to tree branches and use walking sticks to get up it. We had a lot of weight on our backs, and it was insanely hard.”

The experience gave Addison a new appreciation for the stories her dad had brought home from his previous elk hunts.

Eric laughed as he recalled that Addison had always thought he was exaggerating when describing just how difficult it was to pack elk meat out of the mountains.

“She realizes now that it is,” he said.

But the adventure wasn’t over yet.

After packing out the meat and tearing down camp, the two headed to a hotel in Steamboat Springs for the night.

“We had all the elk meat in coolers strapped down on our trailer in the middle of Steamboat,” Addison recalled. “We woke up that morning to discover the handle was ripped off the cooler and it was tipped over. Three bags of meat were gone!”

The culprit, they soon discovered, was a bear.

Addison and Eric began searching the area and managed to recover two of the missing bags.

“We actually had five bags of meat,” Eric explained. “The bear took three of them, and we were able to retrieve two. We never thought we would have to worry about something like that in the middle of a town.”

After everything it took to get the meat off the mountain, losing it to a bear in Steamboat Springs certainly wasn’t part of the plan.

Back home, Eric processed the elk, and the family has already had the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of Addison’s successful hunt with an elk spaghetti dinner.

For Eric, elk hunting has become something of a tradition. He has harvested two bulls himself — one in Colorado and another in Wyoming.

“I’ve wanted to hunt elk all my life, since I was Addy’s age,” he said. “Now, this is my sixth elk hunting trip.”

Eric’s first opportunity came alongside Mike Kruse, Greg Maas, a group of their friends and longtime hunting partner Jake Hawkinson. Jake wasn’t able to make the trip this year after recently welcoming a new baby.

Now, Eric has been able to pass that elk-hunting experience along to his daughter.

And Addison’s hunting season is far from over.

With Minnesota’s whitetail firearms season approaching, she hopes to help introduce another member of the Sather family to hunting.

“I’m hoping to take my little sister, Sadie, out for the very first time,” Addison said. “She is 10 years old.”



Eric, meanwhile, is already thinking about another adventure for Addison.

“I think the next one on our list might be a mule deer hunt,” he said.

“Yep,” Addison immediately agreed.