Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Getting away from the orange. A hard truth.

Some good info here, especially from Dakota Deer. Two years experience poises you to learn faster or quit. When I have moved to a new state/area, it usually takes me several years to find and filter out a good place to hunt, and learn how to hunt it.

I have not hunted Colorado, but in other places I look for short backpack or day hunt pockets that other hunters are likely to ignore because they are too small, not visible from any road or trail, in an area with low numbers of animals and because sometimes they seem too close to a road to hunt. Maybe no such place exists in CO, but I'd look for it.

One is a kind of buttonhook place, less than a mile from a highway but appears horribly hard to get to unless you hike in seven miles uphill on a trail to nowhere and then leave the trail and go cross country back down toward where you parked. The miniscule numbers of hunters who get that far hunt up into the open alpine, once, and never come back. Its meadows and benches cannot be seen from highway nor trail and it appears to be the same heavily timbered cliffs as the rest of the mountain. We've killed at least nine bucks there of which 6 are wall hangers.

My son found this patch by tracking a deer going what seemed like an odd direction, to find out where the deer were.

Along that line, my best moose spot I found by backtracking a moose that seemed way out of his habitat and coming from an odd direction. Found a pocket of moose paradise surrounded by miles of country no self respecting moose hunter would bother with. Five bulls in six years, two of them very big. 4 1/2 miles from my house.

My son has hunted one elk area for over ten years now, and the first two were unsuccessful but spent intimately learning the terrain, where elk went when bothered by hunters, as well as learning hunter patterns in the area. In one of the lowest success areas in N. America he has consistently killed branched antler bulls for many years now.

You are off to a good start, have discovered the obvious, and are in position to learn even faster if you keep at it. The higher the dues, the fewer who pay them.

OTOH two friends of mine, excellent hunters, virtually ignore other hunters and go right after the biggest herds and highest elk concentrations, though they pack in well away from roads.