Describe your best elk hunting spot

[cnelk]

Many people wonder what to look for when the \'boots are on the ground\' in elk country.
So as you reflect on your favorite spot, what does it look like?

One of mine:
It\'s a 2 hour hike on old closed logging roads. Once I get there, the hunting area is about 2 mi x 2 mi. The terrain is mixed aspen and pine with old timbercuts that have grown up. Long ridges come off the mountain with 1/2 mile wide drainages between. Only a trickle of water is in these bottoms. Thermals are good until 10am or so.
The bottoms have good grass and the timber has good bedding.
The long ridges have nice small benches with a few springs scattered about with more grass.
The top of the ridges is where most of the elk rubs are located
When on top of these ridges you can see across to the next ridge but can\'t see into the bottom so glassing is near impossible.
The old logging roads lace the area so it\'s nice to get from one spot to another quickly.

The whole area is good, you never quite know where the elk will be.
I do know the elk will travel a long ways each day to come here.

Over the years we have taken dozens of elk from this area.

A visual for you

 

[bnsafe]

ive only found one aspen grove like that in three years out there, and it gets hammered with other hunters, for a reason. so my 2 favorites are, a small aspen grove we saw bulls in regularly last year, and a steep ridge that runs east west with a taller ridge breaking off and going north. its looks like a T they seem to use this area as a travel corridor. other than that small bowls, like 5ox50 ft, seems to hold sign where hunted. but man is it thick. I LOVE ASPEN GROVES. they look elky to me and more importantly to me, it does somthing to me inside.

 

[cohunter14]

The best spot I ever hunted was a small meadow (100 yards x 80 yards or so) towards the top of a very steep mountain (3/4 or more up the hillside). It was about 3/4 of a mile off of a road, but the hike was brutal. Very steep going up, where most times you could reach out your hand straight out in front of you and touch the ground. We were nuts for hiking up there, but that meadow was spectacular. It had a very heavily traveled game trail going right along the edge of it and was only 300 yards or so from private land, which was on the other side of the mountain. The meadow itself was mainly surrounded by aspens, but there was some dark timber nearby on both sides of the meadow that the elk would bed in. The only time I ever saw someone up there was when they hiked in from an atv trail that led to the top of the mountain, a mile or so away.

Many animals met their fate from the ground blind we built there. The elk would travel through there and feed early and late in the day. They would also use the game trail as an escape route when they would get chased over the top of the mountain from the private land hunters, so there were multiple times I would have a herd of 30 or more come running through. The tough thing was getting there and once you did, trying to convince yourself to stay there for awhile and sit still. Because once you went back down the hill, you weren\'t coming back up that same day That also made for an easy decision to drag elk out whole instead of quartering them up. That was never fun, but beat the heck out of climbing back up there again :lol:

 

[bowhunter]

That also made for an easy decision to drag elk out whole instead of quartering them up. That was never fun, but beat the heck out of climbing back up there again :lol:

Derek, You must have had help dragging them out whole. My bull fell on a 30deg slope and wedged against a tree. I tried to roll him over but couldn\'t. I even tied him off with 550 cord and tried to roll him over the log but couldn\'t. I had to remove all four legs then gut him in order to roll him off his back to get at the loins. I bet if there wasn\'t a lot of blowdowns and snow on the ground would help.

 

[cohunter14]

We would gut them for sure and yes, I would typically have help. There were some blowdowns to drag them over, which wasn\'t fun at all, but it beat the heck out of going up there another time!