JRK -- Well, we never had 4 hunters -- but yes, even if two hunters ended up splitting the cost of a $7,000 landowner tag it was without question not a low-cost elk hunt. But it took me 20 years as an in-state resident to draw a premium-unit bull tag in Utah, so at that point it became essentially once-in-a-lifetime. The cost of hunting elk in premium units in pretty much all of the western states is high, and the cost of having the opportunity to hunt in one of those units every year is higher still. We wanted to know that we could plan to hunt every year, and to get to know a hunting area very well rather than seeing it just once and then probably never drawing a tag for that area again. Because of this we were willing to deal with those costs --but that is understandably not something everyone would want to do.
There are cow tags allocated for Unit 13, but we never bothered to look into those or make applications, so I can't tell you anything about drawing odds, etc.
