20 seconds of terror — my experience competing in the World Elk Calling Championships

20 seconds of terror — my experience competing in the World Elk Calling Championships

(Faith Heaton Jolley, KSL.com)


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Estimated read time: 9-10 minutes

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SANDY — As I walked up to the stage, my heart was absolutely pounding. I smiled and laughed nervously. But mostly, I was trying to remember why I agreed to compete in a world championship where I had no idea what I was doing.

The World Elk Calling Championships were held Friday and Saturday as part of the International Sportsmen’s Expo at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy. The competition was started in 1989 and was first held in Seattle, according to Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Director of Communications Mark Holyoak. While it used to be held most commonly as a regional championship, 2018 is the second year it has been hosted in Salt Lake City as the world championship.

The event has also grown in popularity, with the 2018 contest seeing a record number of participants. Holyoak said 105 people signed up for the free, open-registration contest, but several ended up having to drop out, including one man who said his wife went into labor Friday morning. In total, 93 people from 10 states and two countries competed in the different categories: professional, men’s, women’s, voice, youth, peewee and team.

I was probably the only one who signed up by accident.

Well to be fair, I actually meant to sign up, but it was strictly for the purpose of getting more information about the event for an article I was writing. But when I told my boss that I had registered, she thought it was a great idea to have me actually go through with it and compete as part of my coverage. I was very, very hesitant, but then thought, “Well, I’ve been elk hunting once and my brothers are hunting guides and there’s always YouTube, right?”

Fast forward one month and only two days before the competition, and my procrastinating self finally realized I had better figure out what I was doing. The rules of the competition were fairly simple: you could either just use your voice to make the sounds of a cow elk, a calf and a bugling bull elk or you could use a mouth-operated call that was no more than 6 inches in diameter. You could also use a “grunt tube” to project your call.

World Elk Calling Championships

Since I had signed up for the women’s division rather than the voice division, I figured I better find an elk call. After texting my brothers and discovering that I’d need something called a diaphragm call, I was off to buy the cheapest one I could find. I ended up getting that and a whistle-looking reed call, which turned out being a good decision because for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get the diaphragm call to make a peep, despite all the YouTube tutorials making it look easy.

Fast forward to the morning of the competition and I had spent approximately 15 minutes total practicing with both calls. I finally decided that the diaphragm call was a lost cause with my useless mouth and uncoordinated tongue, so I grabbed my trusty plastic cow elk call and hoped for the best.

As a journalist, I’d been trained to cover the news, rather than be part of the news, so everything about this ordeal raised red flags. But I ignored my better judgment and tried not to think about potentially going viral for publicly humiliating myself.

The room was full of camouflage-clad people and buzzing with conversation as well as a sense of excitement. I could feel how out of place I looked in my ankle boots and knit sweater and wished that I had worn a baseball cap.

Holyoak said the competition is unique in that it is open to all ages and skill levels. I noted that there were mostly men in the room, which Holyoak said was by far the largest bracket in the single-elimination NCAA-style contest, but there were several very young children as well. That made me even more nervous because being bad at something in front of an audience is bad enough, but being totally and utterly destroyed by a 5-year-old is much, much worse.

> It’s fine. These tiny children are a billion times better than I could ever be at elk calling [@RMEF](https://twitter.com/RMEF?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [\#SportsmensExpo](https://twitter.com/hashtag/SportsmensExpo?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/MYXlg7wpvy](https://t.co/MYXlg7wpvy) > > — Faith Heaton Jolley (@FaithHJolley) [March 16, 2018](https://twitter.com/FaithHJolley/status/974723314613608448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Holyoak said the elk competition provides a good opportunity for hunters to hone their skills and do something “hunting related” during the off-season. It also serves as a “reunion” of sorts for many of the competitors who return each year to the championship.

The competition began at noon and the seven judges were introduced, and then the room fell completely silent. I watched as each pool was called and each pair of competitors made their way to the stage at the front of the room. Each individual was timed and had exactly 45 seconds to produce their most convincing cow and calf calls, then another 45 seconds to make bugling bull elk calls.

> A little taste of the bull elk calling at the [@RMEF](https://twitter.com/RMEF?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) World Elk Calling Championships [pic.twitter.com/HZp7VdbmRR](https://t.co/HZp7VdbmRR) > > — Faith Heaton Jolley (@FaithHJolley) [March 16, 2018](https://twitter.com/FaithHJolley/status/974715369825878016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

The reigning world champion, Bryan Langley, of McMinnville, Oregon, has been elk calling for 30 years and talked to me about the difference between cow, calf and bull elk sounds.

“So cows start out with a higher pitch and then they drop it off to a lower pitch,” he said. “For a diaphragm call, you have a little reed, you put it in your mouth and you are blowing air across the top of that, and then you are getting the different pitches in the sound by how much pressure you are putting on the latex on the call and how much air pressure you are blowing across the call.”

Calf sounds are a higher pitched, quick sound, and bull elk make the opposite call of a cow and go from a low pitch to high pitch, Langley said. He also talked about his routine for his calls that he does for competitions. At this point, it was 100 percent confirmed to me that I was totally in over my head and had no business competing at all.

> Looks like today I’m competing in the [@RMEF](https://twitter.com/RMEF?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) World Elk Calling Competition under my alter ego JF Folley [pic.twitter.com/BKCde6aASe](https://t.co/BKCde6aASe) > > — Faith Heaton Jolley (@FaithHJolley) [March 16, 2018](https://twitter.com/FaithHJolley/status/974713760437825536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

About 15 minutes into watching the competition, I realized that not only was I sorely unprepared and unskilled, but I also didn’t have a grunt tube like everyone else and my plastic toy whistle of a call was most definitely just a cow call. I had no chance of making a bull elk sound no matter how hard I blew.

My mind began to race, wondering if I’d have time to run to the nearest sporting goods store to see if I could find a bull elk call that wasn’t a diaphragm. Or possibly I could just make a louder cow call on my little whistle and see if I could possibly pretend to pass it as a bull elk call.

Ultimately, I settled with the fact that I would just have to do cow and calf calls for the entire 90 seconds, and when my match number was finally called, I sheepishly traipsed up to the front of the room. As I climbed onto the stage, I tried to hide my pitiful, neon green call in my hand so I wouldn’t have to admit to everyone before I even began my attempt what a fraud I was.

With my back to the audience (because the judges were behind a curtain at the back of the stage and most of the other competitors had faced them to begin), I began to purse my lips and blow on the call like I had practiced. But no sounds came out.

I began to panic and blew harder, but still, nothing happened. I felt my face begin to go red and I tried shifting my lips. “Do I blow like a trumpet? Or like a flute? Am I pinching the reed too tightly? Should I move my mouth down further or higher?”

Eventually, I managed to get out a sharp squeak, which made me even more nervous because my calf call sounded like someone had stepped on a bird. I kept blowing harder and got out a few more shrill high pitched tones that I told myself sounded like a calf calling for its mom and I kept going. But I was getting out of breath and could tell my nerves were making me worse so I knew the charade was up. So a mere 20 seconds into my 90-second routine, I stopped and walked off the stage.

This is what a cow/calf call is supposed to sound like:

> A little taste of the cow/calf calling at the [@RMEF](https://twitter.com/RMEF?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) World Elk Calling Championships [pic.twitter.com/awnC9UdsXE](https://t.co/awnC9UdsXE) > > — Faith Heaton Jolley (@FaithHJolley) [March 16, 2018](https://twitter.com/FaithHJolley/status/974739540685373440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

This is what mine came out as:

As I began walking off the stage, the woman competing against me in my bracket whispered, “That’s it?” I laughed and signaled to the announcer to cut off the timer and end my misery.

Everyone was super kind and a few people gave me an encouraging thumbs up as I made the long walk back down the aisle to my seat. One guy even gave me a quick, encouraging whispered pep talk on how he was glad that I tried at all and the first time is the hardest.

All in all, it was probably the longest 20 seconds of my life. But hey, now I have a great story for parties, right?

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