Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Elk hunting method

Went pretty good.

Awesome man. Looks like it worked perfectly. Congrats!!!

Congrats CS, sounds like your new plan worked!

Well done, Centershot!!!!

Congrats!

Very nice. Thanks for the feedback to us.

I assume your coming in form out of state. That is a bit of a disadvantage. I'm already making scouting trips to check different areas where I'm looking to hunt. I also know from past hunts where to look. Elk need water ,food & security. Find water & check for wallows Bulls love to roll in them. You will know right away if they are being used. They stink.Bulls pee all over them selves. Once you have smelled it you won't forget. This will mean elk in the area. They like to feed in shadowed areas where the sun needs to be high to reach. Look closely for fresh sign. Droppings , or tracks. Early morning tracks with frost or frozen are old. .Tracks on hillside that show fresh dirt displaced . Fresh tracks have sharp well defined edges. Look at little flats on shaded hillsides with cover. Early mornings watching large areas with fresh sign has definite potential provided there are not a bunch of hunters walking thru it. Though walking hunters can spook out elk. If your camp hunting don't camp in the middle of where you plan to hunt. You will drive the elk away with your noise & odors. Do what ever you can to stay away from other hunters.Being above the crowd helps. If you have the time & ability to climb up above a saddle, sit & watch ( low spot on a ridge ) , elk moving up hill to get away from other hunters use these saddles to drop into dense cover on the other side or other drainage's. You can also look for the deepest hell hole of a dense canyon. Elk move into these when pressured. Problem is if you get one King Kong himself could not pack it out.. Hope I have been of a little help. Remember there are always a certain amount of hunters each season that just dumb lock into an elk. You could be one......

Thank you all for the advice. Great help and ingormation here

Ha! Exactly how I took my one and only elk 10 years ago or so.. Of course, it helped that I was using a friend's topo map with a circle on it that said "elk here".....

He lied. tho. They were only at 10,500, rather than 11000 elevation. The horse hunters topped out on the ridge at 12000.

Checking it out again in October- my son has a permit for that area...., and I'm going, sea-level breathing and all... . I expect a week-end hunt only, tho we have more time.

Hell, at 70 last week, I can watch, at least. And kibbitz what he does wrong... I'm an expert now, ya know...??? .

Bummer that I screwed around long enough to miss the OTC tag... Next year.

I'm retard, now. Officially.

Typical public land methods are:

1. Forget to set your alarm which causes you to be noisily walking into the best country about 10min before legal shooting hrs, pushing all of the elk into the timber before anyone can get any legal shooting.

2. Sit for 60-90min coughing and hacking because you aren't in shape and hurried to your spot. 3-5min before legal shooting light, light a cigarette, cigar, or pipe and really savor the sunrise with a good smoke. It helps if your smoke-maker is buried under 2-3 layers of velcro.

3. Forget and leave your headlamp on after you've extracted your smokes, look around, flashing light all over ensuring that any elk that might be below you feeding up to higher bedding grounds avoid the clearing you're hunting.

4. Start a little campfire 20-30min into your sit because you got sweated up walking the 1/4 from the truck and now you're cold.

5. OK, sun's been up for an hr. Time to head back to camp/town and get some breakfast, listen to everyone talk about how there's no elk around, and gawk at the elk/deer hanging in other camps or in the back of other pickups.

6. Gawking and breakfast are complete, time to fire up the pickup, ATV, or SxS and buzz around the mountain roads/trails, looking for a spot where the elk might be closer to the road tomorrow AM so that you don't have to walk in so far. From now until ~4:00 or so, you might meet some successful hunters coming out with the 1st load on their pack. Make sure you offer them a celebratory cigarette/cigar and maybe a shot if you remembered to bring the whiskey from camp for your afternoon drive.

7. Find a sunny spot for a nap in the vehicle.

8. Wake up chilly, start the vehicle, turn on the heat and go back to napping.

9. Wake up in time to realize you don't have time to make it somewhere to sit, so, you decide to just drive some more. Haul-ass past the thick stuff and stop and glass every clearing within 2-mi. Make sure to spin the tires and rev the engine every time you take off, also, try to slide to a stop when you're suddenly aware of that "elky" looking stump.

10. Back to camp/town so you can drown your sorrows in whiskey and fried/baked potatoes and something spicy that'll keep you up all night so that you sleep right through your alarm tomorrow.

11. Repeat for 5-15 days.

Damn thats what im doing wrong. Ill give it a shot

You've got it right morning and evening, but for midday hunting public land the method that has worked for us is:

1.) Find a smallish meadow with cover around the edges.
2.) Build a small fire near the center of the meadow.
3.) Near the fire dig a 6' x 6' hole in the ground.
4.) Once the fire goes out, shovel the ashes into the bottom of the 6 x 6 hole.
5.) Sprinkle some corn around the outside edges of the hole, and find a good ambush spot in the meadows edge cover (hide behind a tree).
6.) When the Elk comes to the hole to eat the corn, run up behind him and kick him in the ash hole!

Wish you all the best in your Elk hunting adventure!

Ain't that the truth, lol.

Here in Idaho archery success hovers around 15%, (rifle a bit higher but same applies) 90% of those successful hunters are the ones that kill one every year. You want to kill an elk? Find somebody in that 90% of the 15%, watch, listen, and learn......if your not in shape - your odds just dropped in 1/2 again.

You forgot one I've seen many times:

* On the night before opening, drink until you can't see straight and by 3am are puking your guts out. Then, on opening morning, you have an excuse not to get out of bed until about noon.

That is a hard one to answer since methods always depend on the time of year you are hunting elk and the pressure they are under. I hunted over-the-counter tags for several years in Colorado. We hunted south of I-70 from Silt and Rifle in White River National by Baldy and Haystack mountains. Techniques hunting third week in October vs. second week of November were always different. Through Archery and first couple weeks of rifle season elk habits change dramatically. Bulls are worn out from the rut and both scatter to high ground from obvious hunting pressure. You may catch a couple cows crossing drainage ways going from high-to-low and low-to-high elevations at sunrise and sunset to feed, but bulls will we scarce and nested up in the high ground until weather gets really rough. It has been shown that elk, especially bulls, do not move greatly about in late October through November due to extreme caution. Many hold up in a square mile of heavy timber and dead fall eating everything that is edible. Usually the area where they hold up is skirted by open meadow patch just on the outside of the heavy timber nesting area. They will come out at high altitude in these open areas at 9,000 ft and up. At this time the bulls are like ghosts moving out of the comfort zone at night to feed a bit then heading back into the nesting area. Years back I shot a nice 5x5 early morning while I was practically hanging off a cliff about 250 yards from an area such as described above. Elevation was 9,300 ft, shot was about 220 yards, load was a Hawk 250 grain 338 Win Mag at 2,675 fps. Went through both shoulders and flattened him, no tracking that day. My friend went deep into the timber next morning same area and shot another 5x5 with a 340 Weatherby at 130 yards, not having a clean broadside he shot him up the rear and put him down immediately. Good time, but packing two elk on foot from 9.300 ft over close to 2.5 miles was a ball buster. Main thing is you know your around elk by sign, but you know your real close when you smell them, very distinct and recognizable. Today's technology affords great clothing like HEC apparel, which can be invaluable when still hunting heavy timber. Good luck and be safe.

Thanks Rossimp. Hope to connect on one. Safe hunting to you as well.

Do elk ever hide in the deep brush up around tree-line (as in the pics below) during late October rifle season or do they stick exclusively to the dense timber?





Any advice is much appreciated.

Walk the place you intend to hunt way before the season begins and see where the tracks are from and follow them but never step in the elk tracks.
In the pictures above is a water source.Elk have to drink so if your young and healthy you can walk in timber if you want but as an older guy I would watch a water/food source or a trail that leads to that source.
I started hunting elk in 1979 and as a young healthy man I walked timber a lot and killed my fair share of elk but I got old and walking timber is much less now.

Many thanks for taking the time to respond DropShot. I likely will do a bit of both. I'm not young, but fairly healthy. I have some property at 10,000 ft I spend a lot of time on and do a lot of hiking and backpacking up around tree-line; so, I know what I'm up against, and will pace myself. I was just wondering if the bulls ever hide in bushy areas, or if (as I suspect), they just hang out in the dense trees, except, as you note, to eat or drink when they think it's safe. There are a bunch of valleys and ridges nearby, in which the areas below tree line generally are heavily forested; around tree line, there are a lot of heavy brushy areas; and up further it's pretty much just grass and/or rocks.

Below is a broader view of the types of places we will be hunting:





I'm on the other side of the world, getting back to Virginia on Tuesday afternoon, and we're starting driving on Wednesday morning. So, we likely won't get out there until Friday the day before the second (our) season begins. We realize that limits our chances, but it's all we have to work with.

If things don't work out, we either will keep at it or go back to my land and hunt bear. (Have elk tags for one unit and bear tags for the other).

We were are the elk are generally below the tree line by 1000'. The only tracks we see above the tree line are typically where they cross the ridges, which seems to happen at night. I cannot believe that elk can even get into some of the areas we see tracks. Super steep, thick, rocky, just nasty. Our 1st season hunt is a combination of trying to find them in natural habitat along with their escape routes. We typically get it wrong though, sitting on the meadow when we should have been in the escape route saddle and vice versa. I swear my orange vest has a elk enabled GPS tracking device. If I was doing a second season OTC hunt, I'd be still hunting the darkest nastiest places I could find or watching escape routes. They won't be grazing the meadows during second season...

Many thanks for the guidance Mountain10mm. As always, your advice is helpful and much appreciated.