Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Is It Really That hard To Kill a Bull Elk in CO on Public Land

I think if the dow put out the hunter success on OTC non-resident, unguided elk on public, they would take a big pay cut!! People would stay away by the 10's of thousands!

If you work hard, hunt smart you can be one of the 10% that kill 90% of the elk that are killed. Of course if you secretly polled every elk hunter you would find that every single one is an elk genius and just about killed himself "hunting his ass off". There is no such thing as a self-professed "road hunter" it is always those other guys... those slobs>>> pointing to the next camp over!

The best way to learn is find a mentor in the 10%. Short of that spend tons of time and cover tons of country with an open eye and an open mind that's how I did it. A hundred days/year hiking 5-15 miles of elk country every day and learning from each and every encounter. In just a few years you will find elk are easy, until the trigger is pulled, still working on that and it gets worse each year even as the finding part is so easy...

In no time you will be passing on lots of bulls looking for a bigger one, or closer to camp...

This is one of the best threads I’ve read on this site in a long time. Elk hunting is darned hard, especially if you are a flat lander with limited budget and vacation time. If I can add anything to this great thread without repeating a lot of the same points, I’d say you have to expect to see an elk, and keep at it with this expectation.

Just seeing an elk an elk is a huge win as a newbie. If you can find one, then you can kill one. The darn things will show up in the ‘wrong’ places and at the ‘wrong’ time. As KC stated “hunt all day” and I will add expect to see one at any time of the day.

On public land, I say forget sitting on the parks and openings. Concentrate on the travel areas around these spots. At first and last light I like to be slowly moving around grazing sites hoping to catch them up and moving and covering as much ground as I can. There’s so much area that the odds are slim of just sitting and having an elk come walking into an ambush. Also elk are much more forgiving of movement the deer. They smell you and you are screwed, but if you stay downwind you can work them and move with a herd to get a shot IF you can spot them.

SS,
That means you've had 95%+ success rate.......not bad, eh?

If it was a 100% success it wouldn't be hunting. Regardless of how much experience and effort, luck still plays a role........

Everyone hunts to kill an elk, but that's just one of the reasons we hunt. I haven't killed one for about three years now. I've had my chances, and I chose not to shoot for a variety of reasons that I probably can't adequately explain. I intend to be back out there next year, and for as many years thereafter as God will let me have, and I will be eternally grateful for every one of them.

Best post yet.

Good stuff posted, an elk and hunting primer. To further unpack some of the tips:

Learning the terrain and animal patterns on that specific terrain takes more than one season and a combination of boot time plus brain in gear. Don't merely see an event but think about what it means, the factors involved, when it happened, what happened just before and just after, as much of why as you can. Has it occurred more than once in this type of terrain feature?

i.e. I nudged a Rocky Mtn. bull off of an isolated flat bench on a huge timbered mountainside, and tracked his escape sneak. My next time there was three years later. I placed a young hunter 300 yards out to watch the escape route the previous bull had taken, and then slowly still hunted the bench. The young hunter got a 40 yd. shot at a walking 4x5 bull as it sneaked out past him.

Conclusion: Where an elk or a herd went when spooked last year or ten years ago is the most likely place where an elk spooked in the same place will go. Good elk bedding spots or even single beds may be used for decades. If you find one or move a bull from one, remember it and think about how to approach it in different wind conditions.

I have killed several elk and moose by backtrailing. i.e. late one afternoon in snow I hit the trail of a small herd of Rocky Mtn. elk made during the night before heading down from a timbered bench into clearcuts. Hmmm... way too old to be worth following. But I assumed that the elk had returned uphill by a different route and that backtrailing them would lead me to where they likely were at the moment, in the afternoon. A quarter mile up the back trail into timber I killed a young bull that had gotten up to feed in a tiny opening.

My son tells his nephews that it will take them five years of serious hunting to kill their first Roosevelt elk. He got skunked the first three years in one of the lowest success areas in the PNW, but he learned elk and hunter patterns in that specific combo of roads and terrain. Since then he has killed a bull almost every year in that area for 20 years where the success rate is abysmal.

Not to question what you say here because you're quite right but how many people - even retired have the option/time/ability to spend 2 or 3 or 4 months a year hiking/scouting.

My buddy and I went on our very 1st Elk hunt, Fall of 2016. We did the ‘2nd rifle’ season, CO, public land, North of Gunnison. We did hook our wagons to two who have hunted the area for 15 years. I read some & studied maps ahead of the hunt.

As events would have it, I got a nice 5x5 at 0900 opening morning. My buddy got a 4x4 the next afternoon. Both of these were the only elk spotted by the 4 of us during the hunt. There were very few shots in the area. I’ll be the 1st to admit there was some luck involved. I also told myself I planned to go where the elk ‘may be’, not where another saw a few years back.

One will never know if they don’t go. I may be back next year, no expectations on the outcome.

All I said was i did it, it works, and in addition the knowledge translates to new covers as well, given similar cover. If you can't do it you will never be in the 10%... If you WON'T do it then you better find a mentor, or pay for such. It is simply the price of admission to the club, there are no (effective) shortcuts, unless you subscribe to luck, as most do.

I was filleting a Walleye by moonlight once and a my drunken buddy couldn't believe it could be done, I said this one was easy but some of those first 1000 were much more difficult...
Tracking up a bull with fresh snow is not difficult at all, today... but some of those rags back in 1986 were SMART !!

So, if you can't spend 100 days a year hiking in elk country you won't be successful?

Got it.

If you spend ten seasons working the same zone you should know it pretty well, after three you should not be completely without some idea of some hidey holes

I think scouting falls in along with shooting and maybe campcraft in regards to significant off-season skills. Most of us have probably seen extreme examples one way or the other - like maybe the guy you encounter opening day and he asks you directions, or the guy that declares he hit the paper plate last week at 100 yds with all 3 shots so he is good to go, or the guy that arrives in spike camp with 'state-of-the-art' alpine equipment (except that it was state of the art in 1995 the last time it was used).

At the other end of the spectrum you have those guys who would be out there hiking trails and shooting anyway whether they had an elk tag for that year or not. Personally I need to hike those miles in the mountains just for the exercise and mental benefits. I suspect that the best hunting marksmen are the ones who enjoy visiting the range to shoot for the sake of shooting rather than those who may only practice with a shot at an elk as their goal. I've found that some of my weekend trips to look around at a potential hunting area were sometimes more fun than the actual hunt itself. My dogs would agree.

No question that elk are found in different places during the season than the rest of the year, but being familiar with the terrain matters, and bulls will leave evidence of their presence that is specific to previous hunting/rut seasons. Those particular bulls may be long gone but the places they liked are usually the same places the next generation likes. Also, if you are hunting cows, there are places where summer and winter ranges overlap. That is not to say that any of that is a substitute for returning to an area you have hunted previously. After a few years in a unit you can begin to learn that when the weather does 'this' elk will be 'there' or when pressure comes from 'here' elk will do 'that'. Most of my successful hunts had long strings of contingency plans to account for weather, or if an area already occupied by hunters, and so on. Even if it is your first time in an area you have to have a handful of places that you want to try on various days.

There are always 2 bull tags in our hunting party of 4. We’ve hunted west of Salida since 2010 and gotten a total of 4 bulls and a couple of cows. It can be tough.

Expat

That's above average then. Two hunters, eight years, four bulls = 4 for 16 or 25% success.

I hunt and live in CO..... I had over 100 miles of hiking, and about 15 Days (over 3 seasons) into the bull I killed this year. Took me several years to figure out that elk hunting ain’t deer hunting.

You can walk yourself into a deer, they live pretty much everywhere. Elk on the other had, especially post-rut bulls, seem to live in very specific places... and seem a bit more habitual about it.

Corny as it sounds.... I went full-on Randy Newberg style last year, and it paid off. I spent hours on Google Earth and OnX Maps. I found spots that looked tough to get to, and offered all the things a recovering bull would want. Made a trip in early, saw encouraging sign, and then spent most of the season up there. We had opportunities every day, but we still had to work very hard.

There are some guys on here that have forgotten more about elk hunting than I’ll even know.... threads like this can really help the less seasoned guys like myself. I too appreciate the info y’all.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I'd share the link to our hunt when the editing was done. Finished editing it. And here's the link. And if you like it, please give us a thumbs up. Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyfXRzuBdf4

Cool video, it’s kind of funny because I have previously stumbled across and viewed your videos from 2015 and 2016 and it’s the same scenery. If you don’t mind, please pm me what unit you hunted the last 3 years so I don’t go there!....grin