Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Where are our elk?

Here are some so. Idaho traffic cam shots this morning in areas where the elk normally migrate FROM in the early winter. A foot or more of snow is the norm this time of year but we sure haven't seen it. It'll be a couple more months before they publish the harvest results but I'm betting that they're extremely low.
The 3d shot is an airport runway in the Sawtooth mountains. You could almost land a plane on wheels there. Normally they'd be snowmobiling over the tops of the sagebrush by now.

No snow here either, and I am on at Latitude 53.631611 farther north, not an average snowfall year, by far!

Rock Chuck I really like "It's not over when you lose. It's over when you quit." in your signature, so true!

Gentlemen, it's an El'Nino year. It's typical for less snow in the winter in the Rocky Mountain West. Colder, but not as much snow.

Good luck in your hunting!

The snow pack in the area I posted about is only about 50% of normal for this time of year. However - right now we're having blizzard conditions and it's snowing like crazy up there. Roads are closed all over the area. In a couple days after it blows over, the situation might have changed a lot. We'll see. Of course the hunting seasons are long past but we really need the water.

I had about 40 plus in my yard this afternoon, on my little 1.5 acres. Just grazing away.

And that seems to be holding true here in the southern Rockies…..

RC said, "...but we really need the water."

That seems to be the common refrain from anyone, anywhere you talk about the weather. I often wonder how many Americans, on a normal daily basis, can't get water to drink, cook and bath with? Granted, we don't want forest or range fires however, they have been naturally occurring events since time began. Just as humanity has done for the past thousands of years, we'll deal with an occasional lack of water.

RC, I am not disagreeing with you nor am I poking fun, just saying.

Last year it was winter kill, now people are complaining about not enough snow. Jfc

Last year was volcano year. The Tonga underwater volcano put an incredible amount of water in the atmosphere and when last winter started it was still there. Before winter started, they forecast very heavy precip all over the Rockies as the air cooled and all that water finally fell out and that's exactly what happened. It was a 1 time event, not a change in the ongoing drought.

In general, the US has plenty of water. The problem is distribution. The east gets far more rainfall than the west and that's the way it's always been. Easterners are concerned with getting rid of water while westerners want and need it and can't get it. Western states have developed intricate water laws determining who gets the water and who doesn't. There have been threads here on 24hr about the 'nonsense' of not being able to collect rain water running off your own roof. They don't understand the science of watersheds and the laws regulating them. Every drop of water in the west is owned by someone, somewhere as soon as it hits the ground. Battles have been fought and people have died over water. The west has millions of acres of land that could be good farm land but there's simply no water available to farm it. So, it was never settled and is now controlled by the Forest Svc and BLM. That's great for us outdoorsmen but think of the huge increase in food production that would be possible if there was a way to get water from the Mississippi over the great divide.

RC. We see that a lot of that on the eastern side of the divide. Western slope always gets a lot more snow than us. Our biggest snows are the Albuquerque lows that pulls water up thru NM AZ, pushed it NE and then it wraps back around CCW to east side of the rockies and comes driving down from the north. Storms that come east over the Rockies usually don't dump much on us.

When I lived in Albuquerque I irrigated off the Rio Grand Conservancy ditch.When I moved to Colorado I swore I would never water from public ditch again. Lot of arguments and fierce discussions.