Buena Vista – In the heavy darkness of the early morning, Jim Gunter stirred inside the big canvas tent. It was opening day of another elk hunting season, a day the 57-year-old man had treasured each year since he was a boy. Outside, up above the camp on a ridge of thick pine in a majestic place called Buffalo Peaks, an elk moved silently through the soft snow.
For both the hunter and the hunted, the looming sunrise would be their last.
After his family, there was little Gunter loved more than elk hunting. First as a boy alongside his father and now as a man alongside his sons. And always there was his brother, Dave.
“Hunted since we were kids,” Dave Gunter said. “Every single year. The camp and the fires and the stories and the laughs. I’ll never forget a minute of it. Not a minute.”
At about 9 a.m. along a timber ridge on that frosty morning, Jim Gunter saw his elk. He steadied his rifle and fired and the animal fell. Just a moment later, Jim fell, too.
Doctors said his heart gave out. It was the adrenaline, perhaps, the adrenaline that most definitely comes when you fire a gun at a big animal. Or maybe the effects of a long climb to the top of the ridge. And in the snow of the rich green mountains that he loved so much, Gunter died. For his brother and the sons who hunted with him, the most exciting day of the year will forever be something else.
“It will be hard to walk through the woods again without him,” said Chris Gunter, 34, who found his dad in the snow on that brisk morning of Nov. 16.
“He taught me how to shoot a gun and he taught me how to walk, slow and silent. I can’t imagine being out there without him.”
Gunter’s younger son, Bob, who hunted regularly with his father and brother and uncle but was not along on this trip, paused for a few seconds when asked about his father.
“He taught me,” Bob Gunter said, “how to be a man.”
Just outside of Buena Vista, not too far from Buffalo Peaks, a new house sits in the tall grass. It was where Jim and Judy Gunter planned to grow old. Today his strong voice still answers calls on their answering machine. And Judy Gunter, who fell in love with Jim when he was a senior and she was a junior at Arvada High School in 1966, wonders what on earth she is going to do without him.
“He was,” she said, “the warmest and kindest person I have ever known. And he was my best friend.”
It was a dazzling day in the late summer of 1998 when the couple drove west over Cottonwood Pass and dropped down into Buena Vista. They had been suburbanites their entire lives, living in Arvada and Wheat Ridge and Thornton and Westminster. Now, as the aspen leaves danced in the wind on that September day, they dreamed of living in a place where the traffic is light and the mountains soar to the clouds from the backyard.
They sold their home, bought some land and began building their dream house. They moved in about three years ago. Jim, who spent most of his life in the heating and air conditioning business, took a job at City Market in Buena Vista. Judy took a job at a bank.
And then the dream died.
Dave Gunter worked desperately on his brother for three hours up on the mountain that day, performing CPR as Chris ran down the mountain to summon help.
“I never stopped because I wanted so bad to believe I could bring him back,” said Dave Gunter.
He spoke of the old days then, of one memorable elk season spent in the Flat Tops Wilderness near Glenwood Springs when the brothers were in their 20s. He laughed a bit when he told of a heavy nighttime snow that collapsed the tent onto them and their father, Earl.
But the laughter didn’t last long.
“He was,” Dave Gunter said slowly, “the greatest brother you could ever have.”
Rescuers from the Hartsel Fire Protection District got a cellphone call from Chris Gunter just before noon on that November day. A Flight for Life helicopter, guided by a GPS reading given by Chris, arrived on the side of the mountain soon after.
“They hooked him up to machines and IV tubes and they tried so hard,” said Dave Gunter. “But then they looked up and said he was gone.”
Jim Gunter’s daughter, Tracy Woodall, said her father had helped teach her son, Andy, 14, the ways of the woods. Gunter left five other grandchildren.
“Andy spent a month with them in Buena Vista each summer and a week at spring break,” she said. “He had been hunting with my dad twice. We were all so close to him. And I think Andy will miss him as much as any of us.”
“I loved him,” said son Bob, “with all of my heart.”
Hundreds of elk still roam the enchanting hills above this small mountain town. Those who hunted with Jim Gunter will go back again and sleep in the big canvas tent and warm themselves by the wood stove his brother built.
“I’m sure I’ll keep hunting,” said Dave Gunter. “Jim would want that. So next fall I’ll be back up there, up in the woods, and I’ll think about my brother. I’m sure he’ll still be with me.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
