Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Is 40 elk enough?

Back in the 80's when they were really thick, you could get 9 antelope tags a year in Wyoming. Now most years the max you can get is 3-5 goat tags.

To the OP: And there is your secret, if you are still young enough. Pick spots in your chosen district where you would least like to go......


Then go there.

I'll be up to 40 elk when I'm roughly 62 years old. I'm currently 46. I'm guess my answer will be no, not enough.

I'm never jealous of someone elses success but I sure am envious sometimes.

I keep seeing people post that they have killed 40-60 elk. I have missed feelings here. Number 1 I'm just plain jealous. 2 how in the hell can anyone afford it? 3 at what point do ethics come into play? A professional hunter does just that, hunt but I've seen what seems to be a high no. of guys claiming to have done this.

We all love to hunt and we all covet that trophy tag. Should there be a limit? When is it someone else's turn?

I took my first elk in 1974. I was pretty young and ignorant...Now, I'm just old and ignorant, but there is something about being, "In the elk" in September that is nearly unmatched. It's something I want to do every year until I'm physically not able to. I don't even need to kill one every year, but just need to be there....I went back to a recurve 19 years ago. This bull is the only elk I've taken with it. I had my goal of a really good herd bull, or nothing at all. Dozens, and dozens of close encounters through the years, but there was always a snafu involved. I can't describe what I felt when this all came together last fall....it was an amazing day!

Come hunt with me in my unit where the hunters success rate is 3% and then we can talk about who gets a turn my friend... Just sayin.... . No complaints here though. I hunt the hell out of them every year and have been damn near successful every year for the last 10 years. There's, what you call, a learning curve though...

Years ago a friend located a high flat mountain that was pure hell to climb. The elk were on top. As he was dressing out a big bull, a plane buzzed him. Later, after he was home, he got a call from the IDFG congratulating him on the nice bull. They told him that they'd got his name from his truck license parked at the bottom. He was the 1st hunter they'd seen up there in several years. They knew about the elk but nobody hunted it more than once. He said he'd never do that again. The elk wasn't worth the work to get it out.

Eileen and I still hunt elk, but only in areas where it's reasonably easy to get them out. The cow she got last fall was only a mile from the truck, but died in the bottom of a coulee. The coulee wasn't too deep, and within a quarter-mile or so the country pretty much leveled off (or as level as most southwestern Montana elk country gets). We had our in-line Neet game cart, and reduced the load as much as possible in the little time we had, since we wanted to get it out that evening. It was close close to dark and there were bears in the area, including (possibly) grizzlies.

After gutting, we cut the cow in half at the back of ribcage and took off the lower legs. We packed it in two trips, and the Neet cart helped a lot, because it can go right along the middle of game trails, and has handles on both ends, with hand-brakes on the rear handles. I pushed up the hill while Eileen pulled, and when she needed a breather I'd grab the brakes and we'd rest a while before going again. We had both halves in the pickup by 10:30, which was actually a pretty easy deal, considering. But even a 400-pound cow ain't like packing out deer, for sure.

Usually we hunt uphill on closed logging roads, which makes it relatively easy to bring them out with either a cart in dry weather or with a toboggan on snow. Though getting them to the logging road can get interesting.

That's how two "senior citizens" do it. Dunno how much longer we'll keep after elk, but the older we get the more we appreciate whitetail does and antelope.

[/b]A good cart[b] is a good thing to have in fairly even country! Pard showed up with one on a deer hunt. we went up the hill, killed two deer and he wanted to go back to the truck for the cart. ( I'm old school...if Im heading to the truck, I might as well take a deer with me...)

" It'll be worth it." he said....



He was RIGHT!