Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Elk In the Sangre De Christos

Well I drew a sept muzzleloader tag for unit 86 in the Sangre De Christo mountains and now the homework begins. If any of you Colorado guys have hunted or know this area and can answer some questions please pm me. I’m heading down there tomorrow just to see what the access is like in a few areas before I start some scouting trips. I felt blessed to draw a tag right up until I started researching it, man it sure sounds like ROUGH country!

Email me.I use to hunt it. Took a few bulls out of there in ML season.Lot of bears in that area.

Just ask Will Primos...

pretty country. Pretty rough. I suspect that saddlesore will give great advice as usual.

IMHO be in shape might be some of the best advice.

As we learned with elk you have to be MOBILE... move fast and far until you find them, slow to a snails pace till you loose em or kill...

Good luck. Some areas with lots of blown down trees. Lots of road hunters. And private ranches at the bottom hold lots of elk. Depending on where you are there are also a lot of hikers.

However, if you find the right area there's some good hunting.

Saw some bears last year up around 11k feet.

Steep.
The same days effort seems to cover much less ground there than elsewhere.
I think I've seen more elk in the Sangres than anyplace else and I have seen them from one tip of the range to the other (but not during rifle seasons).
One year I was counting sheep on a DOW project and I counted 80 elk in a single day, and not just in one herd, they were widely dispersed and many were in small family groups. The only success I have ever had hunting them there was on a damage control hunt down on the Baca Grande, and even then I had a lot of help.
Last September I had 3 cows run past me while I was gutting a sheep up on Music Pass.
Huge area, lotta different things you can try. I hope someday I can figure out how to hunt it.

We have shot a few down there.Here is one a friend took several years ago.We usually found elk,not a lot, but enough.

Was up there today checking on some access and actually saw my first mountain lion in Colorado. It trotted across the county road right in front of my truck, was cool as hell. Not a big cat , about 60 lbs but wasn’t 15 yards from me.

I have good news and bad news for you.

The good news is that there are a fair amount of elk.

The bad news is that during your season they will be about evenly divided between the timberline basins and the endless subdivisions that cover the lower 25% of the range.

I also have a rental cabin about 300 yards from Alvarado Campground, so PM me if you're interested.

Yeah that was pretty evident the other day. I saw elk down low and saw fresh sign as far up as I went. Gonna be an interesting hunt for sure. It’s pretty thick,timber wise throughout the unit as well.

This is probably the best description for this unit. I’ve been up there 3 times now checking out different parts of this unit. I have zero clue what I think will work in there at this point. There’s so many regularly used hiking trails, several 4x4 roads and yet at the same time you can’t really glass anything. It’s thick as hell and steep as hell. I’ve seen as much bear sign as I have elk and deer too. Thinking hiking into the dark timber and trying to get into some aspen and pray like hell I hear bulls bugling or that they respond to my calling. Definitely not a good spot for my first elk hunt.

I hunt the Sangre range across the line in New Mexico. As close to heaven as you can get here on earth. Good hunting.

Sometimes when things like this happen it leads to the best hunts ever. You won't know till then.

Very true!

I believe you just described the San Juans in Colorado.

There is a unique set of challenges in the Sangres for sure. For having eight 14,000ft peaks it is a very narrow mountain range which translates to steep. The pasture in the Westcliffe valley is premium quality so you would think that you could catch elk moving back and forth between pasture and cover. It is not that easy. The hitch is that the Rainbow Trail parallels close to that NF boundary and the trail is motorized so those herd cows know not to hang around there for long. Southeast of Redwing/Gardner there is a place where the Valley narrows. It is real obvious if you know to look for it. The farmers there find pieces of buffalo skulls and spearpoints from the days when the herds would migrate up the Westcliffe valley from the Huerfano to spend the summers feeding on that grass hay. There is a great story of Zeb Pike’s expedition trying to hunt that buffalo herd in a blizzard there.

Last year I was hunting muzzle-loader season I was seeing herds in the bowls above timberline. I think that is pretty typical for those early seasons. Seeing those herds above treeline is sometimes a great experience. Elk in open country don’t act the same as elk in cover. Out in the open intense bright sunlight is one of the most difficult conditions for an elk’s eyesight but they can still easily spot you at muzzle-loader range.

A few years ago I was watching a herd on the East triangle face of that ridge that runs East of Marble Mountain. Good sized herd and it was late in summer so the antlers had begun to shape up. That particular herd has a real strange genetic attribute for antler shape – long beams but not much for branches. It is almost like they read the Colorado hunting regulations and realized they could get a pass for another year if they stayed 3x3’s or less.

A long time ago, in the late 1980’s, I had climbed Humboldt Peak in mid-July. Rather than going back down to South Colony Lakes Road I decided to descend the East ridge and catch the Rainbow trail. When I got to about where the scree and moraine turns into tundra I saw a nice sized herd above the treeline below me. I took out my binos and watched them for a long time. I counted 54 elk, no nice bulls – just some young spikes. There were some cows that seemed to be serving as nannys guarding the calves. The calves were grouped together lounging in 2 or 3 groups. Eventually I needed to pass by them and I approached slowly. I expecting the lead cow to herd them off to one side.
Something happened next that I never expected.
The herd parted and formed a lane.
The adult cows, especially those watching over the calves, came forward, put themselves between me and the calves, huffed and snorted and pawed the tundra and threw their heads back. They were only about 10 yards away on either side of me. They were treating me like I was a Spanish Matador.
OK – I got the message loud and clear!
I could hardly breathe as I passed through the channel for the smell of elk was so strong.
That wasn’t even the weird part of that day.
Later that night I encountered 2 mountain lions but that is another story … blah, blah, blah … now that I’ve bored everyone to death with stories, the best tip I can give is to try to spot one of those herds before you spend hours climbing to 12,000ft.
There are ancient elk trails in the tundra where those herds I previously mentioned were. Those herds probably are habitual there, but I know from extensive time on the West side of the range that it is not unusual for a single herd's summer range to cover 4 or even 5 of those adjacent valleys and they can move from one drainage to another fast. Bear in mind I’ve only talked about a tiny segment of the range. A few miles one way or the other there is a whole other set of circumstances.

It's been awhile since I hunted it,but in ML season,we never had problems finding elk, bulls and cows, between where it gets steep and Wolf Springs Ranch's fence. This was in the Medano Pass area.We never saw many elk up high during ML season.Where we hunted wasn't all that thick either.

Nah, great stories Al.

A person needs to change his tactics depending on the area. This unit is not for glassing.Get up at 1-2AM and do some 2 note locator bugles in various areas and see if any bulls answer. If they do,they won't be far come daybreak. Then it's up to the hunter to put the sneak on them.Just before dawn, those bulls might do one bugle and then shut up for the rest of the day,unless it's pretty frosty morning. That one bugle is usually also a locator bugle for the bull to find other bulls in the area and where they are at.Hunters using a full challenging three note bugle during this time of ML pre rut season will usually drive those bulls in the opposite direction.Since there has already been two weeks of archers calling them , they have got fairly smart about calls .

Hiking about 2 mile south of the Medano Pass road, passed Dry Lake, a hunter can skirt the west side of the Wolf Springs Range property and get west of it. It's not easy, and pack out is all up hill,but a person can kill an elk there if they want to bad enough.This is way down below the Rainbow trail. Too many guys that hunt this particular area go too high up to the top of the pass. Any elk up there gets pushed back down to either the Sand Dunes side or the east side. It don't take long for elk to abandon those high country meadows when archery season starts.

There are some areas with 2nd growth spruce that have been infested with the spruce moth and are so thick you cnan't get thru them.I never found any elk in them.

The area around Music Pass gets too much pressure as a good 4wd can make it to with in a 1/2 miles of the pass

Not worth the effort to hunt there...trust me. Seriously, beautiful country there....you will have a blast.