Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Advice on Our Elk Hunting Plans

Thanks again to all for your helpful comments above last year.

I just wanted to ask some follow-up questions based on our experiences last fall. I really would appreciate any advice.

We had a good hunt last year, but we did not get an elk on the planned trip described above.

We picked up a lot of valuable information for this year and had a great time though.

During the week preceding the 2nd Rifle Season, the area got a few inches of unseasonably-early snow. I tried on the Friday before the season opener to get my truck up to the desired camping spot 1.2 miles north of, and over high ridge from, the desired hunting spot. I could only get within about two miles of the spot, when I temporarily got stuck. We could have backpacked and camped up there if we had brought gear for that, but we did not.

So, we decided to camp as far up as we could get in the valley below to the south. This ended up making for a fun trip, but it also ended up as a scouting trip for this year’s hunt.

Here’s our fancy camp. It was about four miles south of, and about a couple thousand feet lower than, the desired hunting spot.



Because of the crunchy hard snow, on the first morning we made a fair amount of noise hiking fairly-slowly and as quiet as possible from the camp to the hunt spot.



We saw possibly thousands of elk tracks in the mid-level part of the valley, where where we drove; up the valley, where we hiked; and in the area near the lake mentioned and shown above.

Tracks:


More tracks:


More:


This is in the bottom of the bowl up high. You can see elk tracks in the center of the pic if you look closely (they were everywhere):