Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting How many use Quad runners on Elk hunts...

Problem being is that the users take the Atv's on public land where they have no right to be legally.
I could care less if anyone uses them on officially designated trails. My problem is getting to an area well before first light and having some idiot on an ATV come cruising across a meadow or thru open timber where I am hunting and there is no trail

I can see both sides........and I own an ATV.
It's in camp till something is dead.

For those that are outraged I invite you to the MILLIONS of Public Acres that are in Idaho where you can't take a ATV. Federal protection will insure that your ears of never hear a motor. Yep, take a hand saw to your camp too.......no chains saws. Walk, hunt, meditate and love the solitude you crave.....for free. Awful sparse on game, though.

I'll be in the roaded areas, though. Where the animals are.

In my opinion, the quality of the hunt is inversely proportional to the number of atv's in the county.

Very well said.

One of my favorite hunts start at the end of a rocky 4 mile road. That same road has been responsible for two ruined tires on my truck, I can't see any reason to drive down it with the truck when I have the ATV.

We have killed 4 bulls in the last 5 years back there and have never seen another hunter. The elitist can walk that 4 miles if you wish, but you ain't going to see a dam thing.

Then the Selway or Frank Church is the place for you and your llamas, right?
You will never see an atv, so your portion of quality will be a 100%.

Kinda funny, Idaho has the largest amount of ATV free zone in the lower 48 and the most ATV's per capita.........you just have to adapt to your locale's way of hunting and hunt smarter.
Things keep changing and will continue to do so.
Maybe someday I'll just fish or bird hunt, who knows?

On our fall Colorado elk hunts we use them only to pack out meat but that is on leased land.

This weekend I was hunting in California D-9 mule deer opener, I was high up on the mountain side watching several atv's with my binoculars, I could see deer running ever nearly everytime they cruzed the trail below me but not once did the drivers stop or slow down, it appeared they never saw the deer.

You know what, I apologize. Every time the atv thing comes up you chime in on the opposition and I mistakenly remembered that you did not appreciate NR's also. My mistake.

Now see that I understand and agree with.
If I had to leave mine back five miles and your being a d??k riding right through an area I've been watching for a couple of hours. It's gonna piss me off. and my five mile hike back isn't going to help my mood.

I follow the rules and I expect others to do likewise.

A good share of where we hunt elk is so steep & rocky that an ATV can't get off the road anyway.

Totally agree also.
Off trail riding is wrong and will get us shut out of lands year round....not just hunting season.

Yep.
River breaks and chukar hillside are your friends. Elk like them too, since the wolves have pushed them there.

INteresting, I"m on the inverse side too... more ATVs fewer animals. Never seen it the other way around though its possible.

FWIW just because its a law in areas no ATVs, it does NOT guarantee you won't walk miles, sit down and have an ATV come by. I"ve seen it too many times. Even called a warden once in TX when I had phone signal snd he indicated yes, its illegal but basically I have bigger fish to fry... wonder if he'd think that way if he caught ME on an ATV in tehre....

Maybe the phrase you are looking for is "more animals seen in daylight".
The animals don't flee millions of acres from atvs, they stay in cover more, move at the sound more or go nocturnal.

As usual, a few idiots (ok, the large numbers of idiots) on atvs ruin it for all.....



My comment you quoted was really in the vein of....there is plenty of land with no motorized vehicles. This land also has few elk now.....did the atvs run them off? NO.
The elk (in a hundred mile area around me anyway) have left the forest and moved into ag country and/or river breaks.
This movement has nothing to do with atvs.
Ag land is private and so are alot of the river break canyons.
So you still have the public land hunters wanting to hunt something and they are using their atvs to cover more country just looking for an animal on public ground.
This problem is not going to get better, unless the wolves are controlled.

Peculiar phenomenon around these parts involving ATV's in places they should not be.
The offenders come back to their illegally parked machine to find four flat tires, it seems that some time during their illegal ride in they get little pebbles stuck under their valve stem caps. No damage at all done to the machine.
Very peculiar.

Every group has slobs. We packed Into the Gila Wilderness 8 years ago to an area we had scouted to find a group from Arizona had set up wall tents right in the middle of the trail the elk were using coming off a saddle to water. On the pack out it looked as if 1000 head of cattle had grazed the 1/2 acre where they penned the horses. Two mares had been tied to trees right next to the main trail and pawed and cribbed the entire week. They were staying for the second hunt as well, I can only imagine what the area looked like after the second week. This doesn't make people that use horses bad, it makes that group idiots. With ATV owners out numbering people with horses by a lot your obviously going to see more slobs.

I guess I hunt different than some here cause I have never had an ATV come blasting by me while hunting. If the morons want to "road hunt" off an ATV more power to them, I will just use them to my advantage.

Not directed at anyone particular, but this subject always cracks me up. You always have the "elitist" that say it's not hunting unless you backpack 11 miles or pack in twenty or talk about how many miles they walk a day. Me? Whether it's a horse,ATV, backpack or hiking from a trail head,I'm going to use whatever form of transportation I feel is going to help me best get into areas to kill elk. I have the rest of the year to backpack, hike, horseback ride, ride ATV's or whatever.

What he said! The same idiots who take them where illegal are just idiots and should not be called hunters. I like the wilderness to hunt but a 10-minute ride is a lot better than 30-minutes and beating the crap out of my truck to get to the trail head. I sold mine but would love to have another so i do not have to keep replacing front end parts!

Excellent comment on the destruction hay causes. Smart man. It originally was the guys on horses that got mad at ATV riders. And guys like me who left camp walking at 4:30 am in the dark, using a small flashlight to see the trail. About the time you get to where you are going to hunt, you hear a tailgate flop down and 10 min later an ATV screams past you to beat you to the area you are going to hunt. I now have 2 atv's but I still hate them .

"Horses get a pass and yet the hay that is hauled into back country and the seeds from horse crap change the native grasses to something other than natural." That statement is pure BS.

Anyone who camps and keeps livestock on public land must use weed free certified hay which in our area runs about 16-$17 bale for hay that would normally cost $10-$12 a bale. It's been that way for over 20 years. So if those weeds are growing from seed, they must be darn tough seeds to last that long.

Yet many who use all the trails on public land forget that it was horses and mules that blazed those trials and in most cases it is the horses and mules that pack in water bar timbers, culverts, gravel, timbers for bridges across bars.

This entire idea that horses spread non native species is a bunch of crap and laws passed by tree huggers. People who espouse this usually don't know what the heck they are talking about and don't know native weeds from nonnative. What horses eat does not come out the other end for about two days. That entire argument is akin to the argument that you will get lead poisoning if you eat wild game killed with lead bullets.

Grazing allotments for sheep and cattle lets thousands of head of both on public land and what they consumed before arriving is spread also.Moose, elk, deer birds, bears ,you name it, eat what ever they can find wherever they find it and travel back and forth between public and private land.

Most of the musk thistle and canada thistle is spread by wind which can carry the cotton like seeds for hundreds of miles. and when they come to earth they don't pay attention to see if the land is public or private. Tumble weed ( Russian thistle) gets blown about in the same way.

Of course outfitters who base camp on private land and take hunters onto public land do not have to abide by that as the stock is kept and fed on private land.