Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Elk killed in East Troublesome fire

I've always heard that big game usually escape wildfires. Not true with the East Troublesome. Initial walk around our house revealed 5 elk carcasses within 1/2 mile. Not burned, more cooked I'd guess you would say. Maybe died of smoke inhalation.

Probably surrounded by Flames and panicked.

Could be the fire was moving too fast to get away from in some areas.

Sad to find your game in that condition. I hate to find my whitetails killed by a car and eaten by coyotes. Be Well, RZ.

I am sure that fire consumed more than it's fair share of game. Too catastrophic and fast for much of the game to get out of harms way. Poor critters...

It has been reported quite a few fried bears have been found.

Within a few years all that new elk habitat will provide lots of room for lots of new elk.

Dogs are finding various unidentifiable small animals. Wife found a grouse, maybe a few rabbits.

looks like almost all of GMU 18 was burnt

where do you suppose the Elk went, that got away from the fire?

We’ve seen roughly 100 live ones this week. Near our place there are patches of unburnt habitat, but most of the normal places we find them are burnt. My wife found 2 more dead ones yesterday.

I would suspect that the most carnage occurred the day the fire ran 100,000 acres. Didn't I hear reports of 6,000 acres, almost 10 square miles, per hour? Is there any way to correlate that with the location of the carcasses that you found?

Very sad.

Our place was near the beginning of the 100,000 acre run. There are a view videos from firefighters showing a hellish firestorm which is what got the elk also

For starters. I would guess the unburned portions of RMNP. I’ve seen some photos that my cousins took earlier this week when they were meeting with insurance reps. The whole northern 2/3rds of ranch burned. But a couple of the usual elk corridors look good.

Most of the elk that visit thru on the ranch come in from the park.

These two photos match up. This is looking NNW Sunday morning after opening day Second rifle 2018. Everything you see in these pics burned. I think it even got around the Never Summers in the background. However there were still viable escape corridors to the SE. That they were used, I can only speculate.

Being they have used these corridors for thousands of years, regardless of subdivision sprall to the east and NE, I would sure like to think they were used.

I was checking out the map also. That corridor right up 34 from your ranch goes for quite a ways, it is for certain many escaped that route. Probably some crossed the highway and headed up greenridge. Many from the troublesome certainly crossed into north park. Too big of a firestorm though to not have killed a bundle of em. Makes me sad thinking about it.

We never had many deer. But I had seen both mulies and whitetails in the past. Always several whitetail does hanging around the south end. Seen one nice WT buck about 8 years ago. And one real nice mulie. I doubt they did well. 😞. Also we had a lot of moose. Im sure they high-tailed it for the lake. They were usually good about doing that in the past

The Cameron fire got about 3-5 miles from my house. The next day there was 75-100 Mule deer in my backyard. Never seen anything like that. They eventually moved down through Rist Canyon towards FT. Collins.

I did not see one buck in that herd.


Lefty

So the not yet official estimate is that about 1/3 of the elk herd in Unit 18 was lost. Maybe 1500 head. CPW has had to put down about 170 that had terrible burns and injuries. Reportedly there are many blind ones still alive. This is sickening.

That is just plain unimaginable. I did not figure it would have been that high, but watching that firestorm on the telly was intense!

Now I'm hearing that the estimate may be wrong...maybe not nearly that bad. Probably best to wait on official news from CPW...but not much news coming out so it seems like the rumors are proliferating.

My wife talked to a CPW officer yesterday about this. CPW has flown over all the burned area and did not see large numbers of dead elk. He thinks the above estimate is way off. He only knows of a couple that they have put down. He will be doing their usual population counts by air in January as well.

Cpw has a video out there showing radio collared elk movements as the result of the Cameron peak fire. It’s pretty interesting to see how the responded to the fire.

Good video. The takeaway is that the elk are well adapted to fire--it's been happening since elk have arrived on this continent.

Another point I have tried to make in the past is when the USFS gives an estimate of the size of these fires it's all the acreage inside the perimeter of the fire. On average, 40%-60% of the area inside the fire burns in a normal forest fire (whatever "normal" is), leaving large islands of unburned vegetation. Those unburned areas also tend to "seed" the burned areas.

Usually, those unburned areas were not ready to burn. They will be ready to burn sometime in the future though, while the previously burned areas with newer growth will not burn, once again leaving large, green islands of trees/vegetation.

The forests of the western US are well adapted to fire, and many of these forests are fire dependent--fire is as important to the forest as the sun coming up in the morning.

Amen...

Actually the video is about the elk in the Cameron Peak fire, but the same can be expected from any other fire in the southern Rockies.

The major difference I suspect from the Cameron Peak fire and E. Troublesome fire regarding wildlife is the CF burned over a longer time. I am guessing a good number of critters perished in the 24 hours of Biblical surge during the E.Troublesome fire when it ran 18 miles or so in that time frame. Unfathomable!

The Cameron Peak fire made two big runs. One from the upper Poudre to the Pingree Park area, the second one went 17 miles overnight. It actually covered about the same amount ground in a straight line in less time than the Troublesome fire. The second run was a twin of the Troublesome fire less than a week later.

^^^^thanks for that, did not realize that.

I am absolutely clueless as to how common collared elk are out there, but over the years I have seen several (both bull and cow) come thru the ranch. Always suspected they came out of RMNP.

I killed two cows over the years with a collar and my first bull in the troublesome, circa mid 80's had a collar.

Some years back, blue algae killed ~ 100 elk on a ranch we used to lease.
I asked the manager, about a month later, about the elk - and he said the numbers on the place had come back to ~ normal in 2 weeks or less.
Seems elk are resilient !

it will be interesting to see what if anything shows up on the winter range this winter, between lead poisoning and wildfire it has to be not much in comparison to a few years ago, and there aint much chow waiting on their arrival either. I fear for my haystack... But I predict CPW will find numbers that support tag allotments in either the same or even greater numbers than in recent years. It is a safe prediction.

purty neat vid on the news today.....


https://kdvr.com/video/elk-herds-appear-unharmed-by-fires/6199393/

A CPW biologist put out a video of collared elk during the fire that tracked their movements.It showed they stayed ahead of the fire or moved around it .Not a significant number died

Elk and other big game are well adapted to dealing with fire. The collared elk in the Cameron Peak fire simply moved around it and most to moved to the large unburned "islands". Some even took a shortcut through the fire.

They must have learned during the fire to walk very light footed cause they don't even leave tracks in the snow this winter.