2 things I learned when living in Colorado:
1. Pre-scouting is meaningless. Very easy to find elk out of hunting seasons and not so easy during hunting season as in I never ever saw one over the several seasons I hunted there.
2. You cannot learn the density of hunters in pre-season scouting. When you think you found a good accessible hunting area, everyone else who is upright with a pulse found it before you and is waiting for you to arrive.
Good advice here but I would not write off pre-season trips 100%. The thing they're good for is to get you familiar with the country, access, places you can camp, etc.
But once the season starts, even in a place you've hunted before and know well the number of hunters that will be in any given area is hard to predict.
This is why (IMHO) it's very important to have a few different areas scouted out--if one has too many hunters one year, go on to the next.
