Big Game Info

Description

I started hunting elk after moving to Colorado in 1993. For a hunter, this is a nice situation. Instead of the $250 that non-residents pay, I got my tag for $35, what a plus. At any rate, I lived in Colorado for about 5 years and during that period of time, I lived to hunt elk. I had dreamed of big bulls while reading various hunting stories for years but had never had the good fortune to be able to hunt them. I started reading everything I could get my hands on about the animals and hunting them. The first thing I discovered was that most elk migrate, some quite a distance. This migration is based on the time of year, actually the weather and food sources available. This suddenly introduces a new variable that I had never dealt with as a whitetail hunter. How do you scout these animals before the season, when they may well move to a new area by the time you go hunting? This is a problem. I was used to whitetails hiding when the guns started going off and the countryside filled with hunters, but they remained in the immediate area at least. The second problem was the vastness of the area. Up in the high country it can take all day to walk from one ridge to the next. You can't just go for a casual little stroll for a few hours and scout the area. The next thing I discovered was that while the elk may well use a mountain, they don't use all of it, and they’re rather picky about where they go. They may well only use 5 or 10% of the mountain that you find them on. There are, however, some areas that hold elk all year long which are referred to as resident herds. These herds will usually be found in or near the winter range for many other migrating animals. After I found out about resident herds, I decided that this was the solution. I could treat these elk sort of like whitetails, something I kind of understood. So I began spending lots of time in the mountains scouting for elk. Unfortunately, I had no idea what impact the woods filling up with hunters was going to do to the elk. I saw elk all summer long and patterned them just like I would whitetails. I knew just where to go to ambush my bull. I was so confident that I even invited my brother and a few friends out to hunt. That first year, when we got up on the mountain to hunt, you couldn't get to where I had scouted and found all the animals. We had a foot of snow on the ground and got more almost every day. Being the nimrod that I was, I was shocked that I had to chain-up my 4x4 all the way around and still couldn't get to where I wanted to go. It was an eye opening experience for a "flat-lander" and I was clueless. My oldest son did manage to take a small 5x5 that year. That was the only elk any of us even saw. After CJ took that little 5x5, I got to learn another important lesson. After you get an elk down the fun really starts. This young bull weighed probably 600-650 pounds. You don't just field dress one and drag it back to the truck like a whitetail. I knew they were big, but I really didn't realize how big until this one decided to die at 10,000 feet, 3/4 of mile and 1000 feet below the nearest jeep trail with the snow a foot an half deep.

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