5Redman8, you mentioned conditioning. Do you think there were better places your guide wanted to hunt but couldn’t because you were unable to get to those spots? Folks in outstanding physical condition who live on the flat @ low elevation don’t understand “Mountain Hunting Condition” until they’ve done it.
As for the guide not being there for the evening sit, I guess given that you’d been seeing very few elk, I’d rather have the guide out looking somewhere else rather than have him in my hip-pocket. Divide and conquer so to speak.
Weather can play a major role in game movement as well. Warm lazy-days are exactly that. When you sit down for a snack and your eyelids get heavy, an elk is thinking the exact same thing. When Cold/snow has you afoot to just to stay warm, it’ll have the elk doing the same and country that was deserted yesterday can be covered-up in critters the next.
A guide is like a tool. I can install/remove most Phillips-head screws with a flat-blade screw-driver. If I use a Phillips-head driver, I’ll get most Phillips-head screws out/in. However, even using the properly fit Phillips-driver, sometimes I’m going to strip the screw. You can have the absolute best tool in the world and even then, sometimes, things don’t work out.
