Does anyone know how long you can leave a skinned but unopened elk lie before you HAVE to get the meat off to avoid a bad flavor?
how did you keep it clean to skin it? once skinned, it's only a few minutes to separate the quarters. Why leave it lay at all, with the guts in?
My hunting buddy shot a cow in the neck and it ran off with the herd, which split about 3 directions. 4 or 5 of us searched but couldn't find any blood in the snow, just lots of tracks going every which-way.
Temps were below freezing with overnights below zero. We found the elk first thing the next morning and by then the meat had already gone south. We quartered it up but had to salvage what we could ourselves as it was so bad the butcher wouldn't take it. Elk hide is a heck of an insulator.
Since then I my son-on-law and myself have both killed an elk and had to leave it overnight. In both cases we used the gutless method and quartered the elk, taking only the fillets and backstrap the evening of the kill. We left the quarters laying hide-side up on brush overnight, allowing some circulation but keeping the birds off. Both animals were very good.
