Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Confession Time... I suck at elk hunting

Living in Montana allows you to hunt for elk year round. Hunting season is long enough to use what you learned the rest of the year. You can't do that when you live somewhere else...

Well said.

notamos, I know just how you feel. I moved from Hanover PA, yeah just down 94, to AZ. Five frustrating elk hunts with tag soup. If I had a bull tag, only saw cows, if I had a cow tag only saw bulls. When I had an any elk tag road hunters with their coffee can exhaust on their 3500 diesel pushed the group of elk I was working toward to the nest unit, literally. Hunting white tails is nothing like hunting elk or mule deer. I moved to WY last year, and with the help of some Colorado friend got a little confidence back after taking an okay 2 yo 4x4 mulie opening morning (after a miss from a bad case of buck fever). I learned more about western hunting on that weekend hunting with guys who hunted that area for years than I did hunting AZ for 8 years. A little friendly help goes a long way to understanding the differences between east and west hunting, white tail and elk. Try to find a friend willing to help ya out. Go with guys even if you don't have a tag, the education of seeing what does work vs what you have been doing is worth it. I understand wanting take your dad, too. My dad is 67, back in Hanover, and every January I think about how I can get him out west to hunt with me. I still haven't got my first elk yet, but this years mulie gave me back some confidence and taught me alot. Hang in there, its all you can do, its all I can do. Good luck next season.

Elk are really habitual and remind me more of whitetails but they can cover ground like no other. They are fairly easy to kill once you figure them out though. I've kill about a dozen elk within a 1/2 mile radius. When the pressure is on you need to find big chunks of ground with no roads. We killed 3 bulls this year out of a bunch of 50 elk 4 miles from a road. The good thing was the pack was all down hill but it took 3 days, with the day we shot them, to pack them all out. I also killed a cow earlier in the year along farm fields. Here in Idaho we can use a general tag, buy non-resident tags, and draw for a extra tag. So we can shoot up to 3 elk without drawing a nearly impossible super tag. When I first started elk hunting it took me a few years to figure them out but after that I've only had one year that I've been skunked. I had another year I chose not to shoot one because I killed a moose earlier in the year and had my freezer more than full. Once you find their safe zones or favorite spots there will be numerous elk there every year. Study maps, talk to biologist or anyone else that can help with info, and scout as much as possible. Pay attention to the terrain and elevation (as long as they aren't migrating) where you find sign. That will help you use Google earth or maps to find other potential areas that could hold elk.

From reading Saddlesore,s post and the areas he is talking about I am sure that sometime in the last 20 years we have run into each other. When younger I hunted mostly by backpack and ran into a lot of horse hunters. Back then I could carry half an elk. Now days I hunt mostly young cows. He is right when find a productive spot take care of it and hunt it as much as possible. I have a few spots that are like that but these days I need to make more trips to get the elk out.