Elk Hunting in Colorado

So, back in October I went on a 10 day, Colorado elk hunt with my Dad and a couple of his buddies. Let me tell you a story.

Unlike deer hunting on the East Coast, where there are so many deer that the DEC is trying everything in their power to kill as many deer as possible and it is quite easy to get a deer tag, the opportunity to draw an elk tag is limited to say the least. The way it works is basically a lottery system. You apply for a tag, your name is put in a hat, and X amount of people are given a tag every year. If you don't draw one, you get a preference point for next year. So, my Dad had a couple of preference points for this year, and he drew a tag. Out of seven hunters in our camp, my Dad was the only one with a tag. I didn't draw one, so I went as an observer.

We hunted an area that had been the site of a forest fire in 2002. The Hayman Fire, as it is known as, burned 138,000 acres (roughly a quarter of the size of Rhode Island), and caused over $40 million worth of damage. It was later discovered that arson was the cause. (wikipedia.org)

Typical of the burn site. You look for miles and miles in any direction and see this type of landscape.

One of the positives of the fire is that it created an absurd amount of food and cover for wild game. (As we know, forest fires serve as a natural rejuvenator of soil and habitat.) This place is a mecca for mule deer hunting. The place is crawling with them. Instead of old growth pine, with little bio-diversity, there is now acres of food.

That said, it's hard to figure out where to go and hunt. Every place looks like the place before it. Usually, with elk hunting, you can use their bugle as a compass. Every evening the herd, guided by the dominant bull elk, will leave higher elevation where the temps are cooler, and head down the mountain for food and water. As the sun starts to rise in the late morning, they head back up the mountain to sleep through the hottest part of the day. The dominant bull will bugle to let his girlies know that it's time to move. Usually you can pattern elk, and set up on them, either going up, or coming down. This year, they weren't bugling.

Sunrise in the burn area.

I got to see lots of pretty wildlife though. And some cool sunrises. And the mule deer hunters where doing great. By the third or fourth day all six mule deer tags had been filled.

Mule deer hunters.

And then it snowed.

The weather had been really warm up until then. It would start out around 25 degrees in the morning, pushing all the way up to the mid-70s by late afternoon. But then it snowed 4 or 5 inches and for a couple of days it didn't get very warm.

There is actually an elk in this photo. Can you spot him?

Finally we saw an elk! The first one of the trip that wasn't seen from a car and the second to last day of hunting. We ended up getting a shot at him, but it was probably 375 yards away, and we didn't hit him. But at least one saw one. And because there was snow on the ground, we ended up tracking him for the rest of the day. We never saw him again, but man do they have some serious endurance. A brawny beast built to climb mountains for sure.

Just after the shot.

We woke up on the last day of the hunt at the usual time. Round about 4:45. I didn't have much hope, but at least it would be good to savor one last day hiking around at 8,000 feet elevation.

We went back to the same place that we saw the elk the day before. More or less a pipe dream of a chance. But, it was the only thing we had to go on. We sat there, shivering for a while, when, up over the hill...I saw an elk! Looking at it closer, through some binoculars, We realized it was actually an enormous mule deer. Just a massive brute. Substantially bigger than anything we had seen so far. But it wasn't an elk.

Soon after that, our buddies called us on our radio, and said that there had been a siting of a herd just a few ridges over, and that they were headed our way. We high-tailed it to the top of the nearest ridge to get a bird's eye view of the suspected area. It was a great spot to look. We were probably covering 50 square miles of cover, hoping to see a herd of elk somewhere.

After some time, I thought I saw what could be a group of a dozen or so elk. They could have also been deer though, as they were really far away. My dad never saw them, but, we cut the distance in half, trying to get a better look. We got to the next ridge and couldn't see anything. Whatever was there, was now gone.

At this point, it was probably around, lets say 10 or 10:30. No sign of anything. We sat, and told stories, ate lunch, periodically looking through our binos to see if we could spot anything. This method hadn't worked all week, but, we had nothing better to do and it was turning out to be a great day weather-wise.

Around noon, I saw a little speck of brown a mile and a half a way. "It's either a boulder or an elk," I mentioned casually. We had been through that same game of boulder/elk spottings all week, and so I was pretty sure it was a boulder. And then the boulder moved it's neck, showing some antlers in the process. We quickly packed up lunch, and took off, following the different drainages and ridges, keeping out of site of our boulder/elk.

When we closed the distance by more than half, we got a chance to look through the binoculars again. It was an elk. And definitely a bull elk. He was bedded down on top of a ridge where he could see most everything in front of him. We figured out a strategy to get closer, following a stream bed a ways. If our plan played out correctly, we would pop up within a couple hundred yards of him, without him ever knowing we were there.

We got within 400 yards and saw him again, ducked back down, and cut the distance in half. We then sneaked up a little further, belly-crawling to the top of a flat boulder -- a perfect rest to shoot from. But he was gone. No where to be seen. My dad left me with the gun on the boulder, headed back to the last place we saw him, to try and see if we were just at a bad angle or something. A minute later, he stood up. He started walking towards me. Just ahead of him was an opening. I clicked the safety off. Bang!

Bang!.....Bang!.

I was certain I hit him. I saw him almost fall forward. And then he ran out of site. My Dad came up. "I hit him, I said. And he's big." We headed over to see how the blood trail looked, hoping he was lying dead just of the ridge.

Then he got up again. "Shoooot!" my Dad said. Bang. "Again!" Bang! "Again!" Bang! And off he went over the next ridge.

We spent the next two hours, walking on egg-shells trying to find him. There was a steady stream of blood, but not a lot of it, and based on the tracks it looked like he was dragging a leg. We were down to just three bullets lefts, so I handed the gun back to my dad. "Your turn," I said.

An hour or so into the tracking, we started to see some ravens circling. That was a good sign. Maybe he bedded down, and we'd get another chance to put him down for good. And then there he was! Hobbling over the next ridge. My dad scrambled to get to a rest and shoot, but never got the chance. He handed my the gun, and I sprinted to the last place we saw him, trying to catch him in the open again. Nothing but charred pine trunks to be seen though.

Another hour of arduous tracking, and my dad spotted him in some tall grass in the bottom of a creek, bedded down. He scrambled again to get a shot, couldn't find a rest and shot at him off-hand. Missed! The elk got up, and tried to hobble away again. My Dad finally found a rest (which was a crumbling burnt tree stump), pulled the trigger, and it was down. Dead. And so the epic started.

Success. A big 6x6.

Rocky Mountain Elk generally weigh around 700 pounds. And we had been tracking this thing for miles. We had a rough idea where we were, but we had to somehow get this thing out of the woods, butchered and frozen in less than 24 hours. We had some work to do. The plan was simple. I take out all the unnecessary gear, get the car, and rally troops to come help pack it out. Meanwhile, my Dad would stay and de-bone the elk, getting it ready to pack out.

Four hours later, after a heinous walk back to the car with no water, and then a hike back into the elk, I returned with our buddy Justin. The three of us carried out a hind-quarter, the loins and tenderloins, and the head and cape. We left, hanging in trees, the other three quarters, plus the neck. We would return in the morning to retrieve the rest.

Definitely an epic last day, and an awesome vacation. And now, we have lots and lots of red meat to keep us through the winter.