Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Cow Elk Utah 2016 success

I drew a late season cow tag here in Utah. I had been out 4 times and seen elk all but one time. Each time they were either too far away or too late in the evening to go after.

This morning, my cousin came with me and we parked the truck at 630 AM. We hiked for an hour in the dark and as soon as it got light, we saw a cow way up high. We started to go after her and we were kind of side hilling it. We had been going up the hill for about 25 minutes when my cousin spotted 3 cows going up the other side of the canyon from us. I quickly sat down and got my rifle (Winchester Model 70 classic in 30-06) onto my sticks. I asked my cousin to range the elk and they were 410 yards away.

I normally don't shoot that far, but I had a really good rest since I was sitting downhill and my backpack had me supported from behind. I shot and I could tell I hit her. She started to run downhill and perpendicular to me. I quickly reloaded and shot again and then she disappeared over the top of her ridge. I was pretty sure that she would be down, but since I didn't see it happen, I sat right where I was and waited to see her re-appear up the other side of the canyon. In this panorama picture, I haven't gotten up from shooting. The red spot in the middle of the image is where she was.



She never showed again. So we hiked over, which took about 30 minutes.

We found where she crossed the gas line and followed her blood trail for 50 yards until we found her piled up.




We had brought a sled with us. It took some figuring out what the best combination of backpack carrying and sled carrying was. The sled was pretty small and if we tied ropes around it, the sled didn't move well over the snow. We ended up finding that if each of us carried a front quarter (I had the backstraps, tenderloins, and other loose meat also) and put the hind quarters tied together in the sled, then we could move really fast. It was about a 2.5 mile pack out.