After 5 years hunting elk in the same unit, it occurred to me that, in my opinion - hunting on foot is putting me at a disadvantage for these reasons:

- Too many trails. Over the years, off season hikers, backcountry campers, high country fisherman, and off road UTV/Jeeps have blazed enough trails/rough roads in the area that it doesn't require much effort to get "off the road". We like to talk about most hunters staying within a mile or half mile of the main roadways, but when you can get on a cut trail or UTV 2-track - you can go deeper with ease, stacking up the hunting pressure.

- Too much deadfall. Beetle kill has ravaged some parts, and impacted most of it. Anyone who has attempted to traverse beetle kill deadfall knows that it kills your progress, and makes for a dangerous hike in/out once things get icy and snowy.

- Horse hunter advantage. I can't beat the horse hunters. Some are guided, others are DIY horse guys. Even the swiftest backpack hunter stands no chance of getting as far back in a day as the horse hunters can get.

So all of this had me thinking: What is the ideal backpack hunting terrain? Is there a type of country where setting out on foot gives the backpack hunter an upper hand? I don't know of many places that ban horses, and UTVs, and roads, and trails, and guides, etc. Or maybe there is, and I just don't know it.

I'd be interested to hear what some of the more seasoned, well traveled backpack hunters think about this. Have there been places where you felt like the backpack hunting method put you at an advantage?

My ideal terrain: slightly downhill, both ways.

JK. My ideal terrain is first and foremost roadless with no motorized access. Ideally with few trails and the trails that are there are down low along streams. This makes it easier to hike up ridges and lose the crowds, nothing like a steep climb for that.

Beetle kill is a function of elevation and moisture, the more moisture the less stressed and susceptible the trees are. So if you can hunt higher elevations on the shady slopes you'll be better off. That's easier to do in the early seasons.

As far as horse traffic, the only thing I can suggest is to hunt an area, figure out where outfitters and others tend to set up, and avoid those areas. It's somewhat trial and error and changes from year to year.

Hope this helps.

Edited to add, there is no place on the NF that bans horses or outfitters that I know of. Outfitters are licensed to work certain areas though.

Denali National Park is nice in August. Lots of people, but very few of them hunt. Wildlife is abundant.

There's a happy medium between where day hunters can go and the horse hunters. Depending on the area, it's probably 4 to 8 miles from the road and with enough intervening hills so that the roads wouldn't be visible if the all the trees disappeared. You might still see a day hunter there, but there won't be many. I think some outfitters will take their hunters past some very good elk habitat because the hunters expect to get 10+ miles from the road. They want their money's worth.

To follow up on my sarcasm...

Once in the Brooks range we walked in 12 miles just to find a fly-in camp with a guide and 3 clients, all of whom had killed rams. A different time in a different range we had a plane land on a lake downstream from us and hunters walked by our tent in the middle of the night to leapfrog us to get to sheep. That was probably 100 miles from a road. There is always the potential for unwelcome human interaction.

On the deadfall thing, maybe you are looking at it the wrong way. You have found a place that is difficult to travel in. I'd think doubly so for horses... maybe that could be used to your advantage.

Terrain where bulls live... the rest I don't care about because my "ideal" would be inhabited with too many other hunters being too gentle. And, of course, bulls wouldn't be there anyway... unless private land.

Thanks for the responses.

Brad, it sounds to me like you've embraced the "suck" of the nasty terrain where bulls live, be damned if its difficult for travel for the backpack hunter.

Maybe I need to embrace it more. I've just struck out on finding the elk there, which adds to the misery of the difficult travel.

Find a place you can get high and glass, glass, glass, covering a lot of ground. Morning, mid morning, afternoon, and evening. After locating your bull, stalk, terrain be damned

Thats always the advice I hear, but where I hunt - getting high doesn't give you long views of park pockets, sparce timber, etc. Instead, it gives you more views of dark, thick timber, steel shady slopes, etc. If there are places you can see elk with glass, its gonna be a Looooooong way off and a nasty hike to get there. You aint getting there today.

Maybe I'm not going high enough. 11,800 on my last trip, and all I was looking at was peaks above tree line, and timber too thick to penetrate.

I don't think the problem is altitude, I think it's habitat. When I first moved out west I hunted areas like you describe, with limited success. Looking back, the habitat in those areas was not as good as the habitat where I hunt now, and those areas held significantly fewer elk. For an area to hold large numbers of elk, IMO it needs a good mix of thick cover and open areas with lots of grass. You probably won't be hunting them out in the open during rifle season but they'll feed in the openings at night. Unbroken expanses of thick doghair timber just don't have enough feed to support large numbers of elk over the course of a year. Plus it's hard to locate elk in thick timber when they're not bugling and there's no snow, you have to walk right up on 'em. If they're sparse to begin with, you can do better somewhere else.

I switched hunting areas, actually tried a different part of the state and had better results right off the bat. Part of it was more parks and meadows with more feed and more animals, and part of it was the quality of the soils and the habitat. In the first areas I hunted the grass was short and sparse. In the areas I hunt now it's lush and waist height by the end of summer. No comparison in the quality of the feed and the number of animals it can support. You can see it in the trees too. One more clue to look for is the underlying bedrock. Soils that form over granite are generally thin, with low cation exchange capacity, low pH buffering, and low moisture capacity. Soils that form over sedimentary rocks, especially shale and limestone are thicker, richer, and hold more moisture and you can see the difference in the quality of vegetation that grows there, and the numbers of animals the habitat supports.

glacier- Ice is always better than the morraine.

The best view with the least people.

I’ve found that mere distance isn’t always an indicator of good hunting; while more distance often helps shed competing hunters, it usually doesn’t shed them all. But as Brad eluded to, habitat that bulls (longer lived bucks too) occupy; especially as the season progresses, are generally areas that see very little human traffic because they aren’t overly “fun” to hunt, quite the opposite. Sometimes these are a ways in, sometimes not.

this!

I prefer to hunt the easily accessible stuff with tents stuffed together like they are at front door of a Best Buy the night before Black Friday

I'm with Drum--right on the money. Except, I don't want to pay to park the motor-home. Some of those other comments above appear untrustworthy, like soil types and bulls being present.

*** OT
Jane says they are cooking hot dogs on sticks just by hanging them out the window in Loveland, Drum....:) Hope to snag a coffee with you later this year...

Can’t wait! Tell Jane they can come over and grill here and we’ll fish the lake behind the house! Talk to you soon my friend

Reality is that the elk dictate the terrain. It is a common and often unconscious desire we have as hunters to find the animal we are hunting where we want, in the terrain or place we want to hunt. It is a strong trait among predator and other animal callers but is present across all kinds of hunting.

The question has several levels to it. One approach is to hunt terrain. Another is to hunt elk. (As an aside, where deer are plentiful, a man can hunt terrain with good success. That is far less successful with elk.)

My ideal terrain would be shaded firm lawn grass level where the bull falls and downhill from there a short distance to my freezer.

In every kind of hunting anywhere on earth the better hunters learn to hunt the local animals in the terrain they have to work with, in whatever terrain where he finds the animal he wants to shoot.

I am struggling to express my thought and may add more to this as the thread continues.

Terrain is immaterial if the animals live there.

So steep not much else can access it except foot hunters . We have a lot of that ... unfortunately we have a lot of foot hunters that are not afraid of it either . Pack outs however ... can suck

Noticed this thread and had a memory come up re elk and terrain:

One Fall we hunted was exceptionally hot and dry. Elk were concentrated in a string of swamps along a river. I was astounded to see the first one, a bull out in the middle of a vast sea of swamp grass and cattails, purely luck to notice it. Then we started looking and hunting them there, wading as needed, etc.

The elk gets to pick the terrain. We adjust location and tactics to meet them there, or we can have an enjoyable time hunting terrain we choose. Elk do have patterns but there is a big range and the key is to find where elk are right now when I am hunting.