skinsscalper:
SCOUT, SCOUT, SCOUT.
If I were you, I would spend every weekend from now until the season starts, getting to know your hunting grounds and elk movements within that territory. I would study maps, then take lots of day hikes and overnight backpack trips into your area. Take your time and stop to study what you see around you. You will be on fact finding studies and getting somewhere is not the goal. The journey and what you learn along the way, is the goal. Get off the roads and trails. Do lots of cross-country hiking where no one else goes, except the elk. Then transfer all that you have learned onto your maps.
In Colorado the Division of Wildlife publishes big game maps containing lots of good info that's area specific. If AZ offers the same, I would study what they have to offer. See if they show where the elk spend the winter, where they calve, where they spend the summer and the routes by which they get from one place to another. Transfer that info onto your maps too and memorize your maps.
Then take some more day hikes and overnight backpack trips. Learn where the water is, and where the game trails are. Where there are meadows, aspen groves and dark timber. Try to figure out, if you were an elk, where would you get your water, where you would feed and where you would hide through the night. Learn where the mean nasty hiding places are located and how to get into those places in the dark before the sun rises.
If you wait until hunting season to do all this, it will be too late. You need to know this stuff before the season starts so you can develope several hunting strategies that are based upon field gathered data. You need to know your hunting area like your back yard and you need to know how and when the elk move within that area, specially how they move as a response to weather.
BTW if you think that you can be successful and not do this because the wife has other plans, or you have to take the kids to soccer games, or you have to work, or you have to go on vacation somewhere else, or you have to visit the realtives, or you have a weak back, then forget hunting. This summer you have spend hunting and other priorities have to wait.
Good luck and safe hunting.
KC
