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.