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

It is nice to get Randy's viewpoint as a guy who needs elk to show up in camera range with someone filming he needs to see elk. I watched one of his shows where he rented an aircraft to leave the orange behind.....if I remember correctly even then they weren't alone on that public area.

Two years really isn't much time to make as many mistakes as most folks before they start having success.

Finding the elk is key - in a bad 2nd season I kicked up 2 bulls within 800 yards of an outfitters horse string starting out camp. They were bedded separately with a single and 2 cows in a wooded area way less than a singe square mile between a main road and accessible ATV path. They found a refuge that I stumbled on by following fresh tracks but not being quiet and sneaky enough or setting up an ambush they both escaped. Two mistakes in 20 minutes by the same idiot ....me.

It is easier said than done but hunt like you expect to find and kill a bull the minute you leave your sleeping bag. Just being ready when the elk show up will get you a lot of elk that you would normally miss.......another piece of advice I give but way too often forget.

So in July I'm strategizing how to battle the orange and my own impatience and stupidity. I took 3 years to kill my first elk and now I have 12 down in the last 12 years hunting the same areas full of orange ......and as I have shared often times despite being impatient and stupid. Every year I make several stupid mistakes when I replay the season. These days I buy a bull and cow tag so my mistakes don't cost me an empty freezer.

With all due respect to the deceased, my elk hunting mentors were good people but not very good at hunting elk. Still, they helped me get started, for which I am very grateful, and over the last 34 years I’ve learned. Slowly.

Some things I’ve discovered doing Colorado public land (mostly) and RFW (4 IIRC) hunts:

1. Hunt where the elk are. Sounds simple and natural but they move. A lot. And a long ways. We used to camp high every year and basically hunt within a few miles of camp. Some years we would see elk, other years none. Now we camp low with access to main roads and may hunt various areas up to 60 miles from camp, depending on the tags we have and conditions on the ground. If the weather is good we may hunt high, if bad we may hunt low. If there is fresh overnight snow on the ground and no tracks, we look elsewhere.

2. If you want meat in the freezer, get a cow tag.

3. Persistence pays. My hunting buddies tend to hunt the weekend and maybe Monday and they don’t hunt every year. I hunt every year, stay the week and have taken more elk than all of them put together.

4. Pay attention to the migration patterns. When the migration is on the elk will come to you if you are in the right place. Since 2010 I’ve taken 2 cows and a 6x6 bull migrating through a little patch of public sage land about a half mile deep and a quarter mile across that borders a state highway. We’ve taken more migrating elk out of other sage land. The migration can be your friend.

5. Hunting slower often yields better results. We used to put 35 or more miles on our boot soles during our elk hunt, often to no avail. Now that I’m older I might do 15 or 20 but success rates have gone way up, in part because I spend more time resting and looking and see more elk.

6. Good binos are your friend – use them. Leave the pocket-sized glasses at home.

7. Success often comes late in the season when most hunters have gone home.

8. The presence of other hunters is not necessarily a bad thing and can be an advantage. Figure out where the elk are likely to be, where the hunters are going and what the elk will do in response to the pressure. (Including staying put. We’ve found elk in small patches of woods that hunters simply bypassed.) We have a favorite spot where elk get pushed back onto public land by hunters on private land.

9. Food, water, shelter. Elk need these.

10. Know what you are going to do after you pull the trigger. A hunting buddy and I got three elk (2 cows and a bull) down on a mountaintop 3 miles from the truck. Only freezing cold weather kept up from losing any meat. It took us 3 days to pack the meat out on our backs. Never again. Hunting farther from the road may or may not bring greater success but it guarantees a longer pack out when success is the result.

Sounds great to me, I love hauling meat.

If you spook elk enough to get them running , don't bother hunting for them in the same place for a long time. They won't be there.

Most of the time. I do recall shooting a cow within a hundred yards of where I shot at her and missed the evening before (drilled a 6-inch pine tree). She sure did haul ass out of there when the bark was flyin.'

It's almost like saying you shouldn't hunt near camp because no elk will be around a camp. Most of the time.

Great advice. It took me better than 20 years to draw an excellent trophy area. It was worth the wait. As saddlesore pointed out, without getting in a limited entry unit, expect to see other hunters.

If you're able to draw a rut hunt, general season elk hunting rules won't apply. Herd bulls won't run far. They will return to their harems. My guide and I chased a huge bull for miles. He never went far from where we first spotted him. We chased him for miles over I have no clue how many ridges. He merely circled over ridges until I was finally able to kill him. He was a bull of a lifetime.

BTW, that unit produces 400+ bulls every year. But getting a tag for unit will take many years.

We heard bulls bugling right near our camp. When bulls are in rut, they have a one-track mind.

OurdoorAg,

Check out Eastman's for excellent elk hunting info.

Are you sure it was the same cow? Or maybe one that was shot at 2 miles away the day before?

he never forgets a pretty face.....

Funny you mention that, he said he was a park ranger, and was tasked to go out and help the game wardens. I was kinda a bit amazed at seeing him out there, we chatted for some time, and I finally asked if he wanted to see my license, wife was just along, and he said sure, we chatted some more and he went on his way. I never even thought to ask where he normally worked out of .....

I was still kind of amazed they'd task someone like that to go check on hunters.

I've noticed that some hunters who do actually hike don't bother to stop and glass much. They're just moving through and aren't in spots they can see a lot of country from anyhow.

I don't sweat the crowds too much. It does get annoying, but you can work around them usually.

If I wasn't sure, do you think I would've told that story?

Extensive and/or rugged terrain, binos, and spotting scopes are my friends. Roads/rigs/and ATV's are not.

I think it was Confucius that said "elk are where you find them'.

A very true statement.

Due to all the pressure, just because you have not found any fresh sign yesterday or today, does not mean elk won't move in overnight. Elk can, and will, move a long ways quickly.

I was coming home from a 2nd season deer hunt, driving S on Hwy 9 from Green Mountain Reservoir, and saw a few elk on a hillside above a public campground along the river. By the time I stopped, there were maybe 3 dozen elk up there, with more coming out of the trees. I stopped counting at 121, with many more piling out. Just above the elk sat a 'trophy' house.

So, 'elk are where you find them'.

There's a guy who used to post here by the handle of Greenhorn, who is arguably the best elk hunter on this forum, if pictures of downed elk are the measure. He's a young guy, lives in Montana and walks his ass off and kills some spectacular elk. Lots of scouting beforehand. I envy you folks that live out there in God's country and have ample opportunity to hunt in this fashion. Me, I'm condemned to live in fully Florida, don't have the time to invest, so I pay to hunt. I'm OK with that.

Close, but you're probably thinking of shrapnel.

Checked my records but it was too late to edit and correct the post above.

My records show 5 RFW (Ranching For Wildlife) hunts, not 4. Also 28 public land hunts and one year I didn't hunt elk since I started in 1982.

Getting older helps a lot with the impatience. Or at least hiking through the woods so fast you miss the elk or spook them.

A couple years ago, we'd been hunting for days without seeing a track. Then we got 6" of snow. Driving down a back road heading to camp after dark, we found lots of elk that had just arrived from somewhere, within rock throwing distance from the road, right out in the open sagebrush. The next morning before light, we were back and the elk were still there. We sneaked in through the sagebrush and when it was light enough to shoot, bang, bang, 2 in the bag. We were even able to get the truck through the sagebrush to load them up.