New Here - Seeking Scouting Tips

[DaleL]

Hi all, I have been lurking for awhile. Great site and lots of good information.

Got the elk bug and my family and I are headed out to Colorado for a summer vacation (scouting trip for me hee hee). We are going to stay in the center of several otc units. We have been to Colorado before vacationing and felt the call back. Just looking for a few tips as to what I should be looking for during my scouting trip this summer.

I will be getting some good maps soon as the family and I will do some hiking. We did Glacier National Park last summer and went on a couple of grueling hikes. So I know what their capabilities are and mine. I already have been using google earth and the country I am looking at is absolutely breath taking.

Where to start? I am assuming one would find the nearest trailhead to the spot I want to check out and hike in from there. In July, will old wallows be visible? I know old rubs will be visible. How far off the beaten path should I get? Where I see elk in July will this mean anything for a late August/September hunt? It would be fun to get above the treeline for the view but would this location be a good early season location. Maybe I should concentrate on finding good high water sources?

Any and all suggestions welcomed. Maybe there is a good elknut video or link I should visit/get?

Thanks,

[WapitiTalk1]

Welcome to "the" elk forum buddy. Glad to have you on board! Here's a bit of light reading to get you going.

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=45

viewforum.php?f=24

[DaleL]

Thanks for the links. A wealth of knowledge. I guess I will need to get a spotting scope

[Charina]

Hey Dale, I'm another "new here" person.

When looking at a new-to-me area, the first thing I do is the GE scouting, and tracing all the roads in the area I'm focusing on. Unfortunately, GE doesn't have the capability to maintain visibility of the various smaller roads as you zoom out, so I trace all the dirt roads and atv trails with different path colors, depending on how major the road is. As you are looking at a variety of areas, this may not be feasible, but it's very useful to find areas I want to focus in on. I look for those areas where the elk can go and remain undisturbed by trucks and atvs. Areas that have no roads, and a variety of good habitats and topography.

Then I mark various features I might be interested in. Water. Potential food. Saddles/passes. Benches and finger ridges for bedding. Places I will try to check out while on foot scouting in the summer.

And I make sure that I have a few such roadless areas selected and marked up before I get in the truck and head out during the summer. Sometimes I find that the area has an atv trail I didn't see on GE, or simply has no feed/water/sign as I had hoped might be there. So, I can rule out the area and move onto another.

I enjoy seeing elk as much as anyone, but I'm not out there to see elk. I'm looking for where they might retreat to when the pressure is on from the influx of hunters. I'm looking for major trails between feed/water and bedding areas. I'm scoping out bedding areas, and trying to divine from the age of the droppings if they use it during winter, summer, or perhaps all year long (hard woody, soft mushy, or nicely formed regular black). I'm trying to get familiar with the lay of the land, potential approaches to areas of interest, and if that 'gentle' slope I saw on GE is something I can actually tackle when I see it in person and realize it's more like a cliff than a slope!

[DaleL]

Thanks Charina and welcome too. Thanks for the great tips.

[Lefty]

He is my take.

Im far from a great elk hunter. But I am addicted to archery elk and all the scouting that goes into it.

I was a commercial fur trapper. I covered a lot of ground and I set up traplines using county highway maps in country I had never been in. Then refined the trap line running the trap line.
I didnt know much about bears and picked each of my bait locations solely by topo and Google earth. So that6 part of scouting can be done

Get out and cover ground I think most good hunters find a few honey holes by hiking

[DaleL]

Lefty, my first job was trapping and than working for a fur buyer. Loved it.

I'm guessing honey holes can be close to roads as well. Places people overlook or places that are hard to get to. That is one thing when studying maps, sometimes it seems there are roads and trails all over the place. I know the distance thing can be misleading purely in looking at it from 1000 miles away on a computer. Roads can be a good thing to as they provide access.

[DaleL]

I just saw the Scouting Elk Country dvd. This probably would cover most of my questions. I also see some great packages offered. Which one to get.

[Indian Summer]

To answer a few of your questions: Yes old wallows will be visible. They are always there. The black mud may be dry around the edges and they may be void of any fresh sign but a wallow is permanent and is something used over many generations by the elk. Like any deer rub old rubs will also be visible although I pay little attention to those when scouting.

In Colorado one thing I would definitely do is look at the regs and try to avoid a peak of the rut muzzleloader season which can wreak havoc on the amount of bugling and daytime activity in general.

[Lefty]

I'm guessing honey holes can be close to roads as well. Places people overlook or places that are hard to get to. That is one thing when studying maps, sometimes it seems there are roads and trails all over the place. I know the distance thing can be misleading purely in looking at it from 1000 miles away on a computer. Roads can be a good thing to as they provide access.

My last rifle bull was killed 300 yards from a major ATV trail, his beds were slightly closer
I also have a sweet spot near a US highway and a major Forest Service road, Im saving that place for when Im too old to walk.
North slope, and thick timber. a couple of seeps and wallows Everybody drives by

Right on the edge of Pocatello are a number of horse, hiking, biking, and ATV trails. One mid-day ride I pointed out to my wife some fresh elk track just 100 yards from the busy trailhead and city limits. After our ride there were more fresh elk track on top of everyone's track. Kids screaming away at the trailhead

On my first elk hunt 25 years ago . The fellow who had the "worlds largest elk" (Russian) camped at the same trail-head He pointed me to a location where I killed my first bull. He literally hunted just feet of the main trail. Depending on the wind, he parked his ATV was 10-50 feet away. Killed a rifle elk there every year for many years. He suggested a similar place about a mile away for me to hunt once my legs turned to rubber. After two days of miles and lots of elevation I walked down to one of the trees he suggested, trimmed the tree for more comfortable sitting. Killed my bull at 39 yards just minutes later
He had some simple advise that a lot of fellows give;
"Elk are where you find them"

[DaleL]

Lefty that is interesting. But it makes sense that they find an undisturbed spot and make it home.

[Indian Summer]

Great post Lefty. I know places just like that. I know a place or two where, if you went more than 3 miles in you would have passed up the best hunting. As a matter of fact beyond the 2 mile mark the hunting actually goes downhill and if you only hunted far from the road you would probably think the hunting there was pretty bad.

One of my clients last year hurt his good leg before the season and was unable to hunt. But he went out anyway to check it out for this year. He camped at the road and was into bulls relatively close most every day. He laughed and said they kept him up at night at his camp and he's looking forward to hunting it this season.

Mileage means nothing.

[Charina]

Mileage means nothing.

That might be a bit too broad of a brush to be painting the picture with from my perspective. Perhaps you are speaking only of multi-mile advice? If I were a newb, seeking advice on how/where to scout, and I read the above, I probably would spend way too much time too close to camp, as I did for the first several years as I hiked the steep learning curve.

My first elk experience, archery hunting 20 years ago in OR, was within a couple hundred yards of a major and busy two lane highway. Just about as far from camp. Plenty of elk in the clearcut regrowth where logging trucks and cars buzzed by at 60mph just a short distance away. But, as I’ve picked elk hunting back up in the last few years as the kids have grown, here in UT, on the general season (OTC) units, I’ve come to find that more times than not, mileage does matter, to an extent. (thinking about that hunt reminds me of a crazy story about playing on my external reed cow call, going up and down up and down up and down, playing it like a kazoo, and I received a response very similar – so I presumed it was my buddy responding in kind, and I stopped sneaking around, and walked briskly downhill to where the sound came from. 50 yards later where the sound came from, elk began busting out all over the place as I ended up in the middle of a bedded herd. They make some rather unorthodox sounds sometimes.)

I more readily agree with the statement in the other thread stating: “Steep terrain can deter the crowds just as much as miles of distance” and ”geographic features can be as good or better than lots of miles”. Three years ago, I found bedding sites and bull tracks in the snow within ¼ mile of my and several other people's camps. But that ¼ mile was very nearly 1000 ft in elevation gain, and not visible from the road below. Sure, elk tracks crossed the snow at night in the canyon bottom in between camps. But daytime after the morning “commute” of atv’s and trucks passed by, I found no tracks within ¼ mile. That’s been a pretty consistent observation for me in high pressure areas.

Here in UT, on the OTC hunts, as a general rule, I encounter many more elk when beyond ½ mile from a road in steep, rugged, or secluded areas where there is no direct sight or sound to a road, and greater than 1 mile when the terrain is more level, or there is direct sight to any of the nearby roads. In a lot of UT’s units, its not that easy to find these spots, as there are tons of roads crisscrossing all over. And I don't much mind letting anyone know that. I know that those that will go the distance probably already do, and those that won't continue to hunt from a vehicle despite me telling them "there are elk just 1/2 mile over there". Yeah, I find elk much closer than that to roads from time to time, but it is far less common than when I put even just a little bit of mileage on the boots.

This last fall was a good example of getting away from roads. I arrived several days early, and camped further out into hunting areas than I usually do. I was 30 yards off a dirt road that any 2wd car could travel, but about 2 miles further down the ridge than the closest camp. I didn’t run my ATV around, and kept truck traffic to a minimum and only during midday. I was scouting the area out on foot. Elk were out at shooting light in the morning and evening on the ridge I was on, and the adjacent ridges I could watch with just binocs (sub 1000 yards). I was kept up for hours each night as bulls bugled all around me for an hour before sunset into the early morning (a good “problem” to have – but it did wear on me after a while – kind of hard to sleep while a bull is bugling and raking an oak tree just 20 yards away).

Everything changed drastically Friday evening before the opener. The ATV and truck traffic started in earnest about 3-4 pm. People were scoping out where they would setup at first light. There was ZERO bugling that evening until almost 10 pm. They moved back into the area at night, probably for water as it’s scarce in the area, and there was a cattle retention pond nearby, but the elk were nowhere to be seen or heard come morning. I found elk every day for five consecutive days after that opening day – I was within 5 to 80 yards of elk those five consecutive days (never did see a legal to shoot spike though). After the influx of traffic, I checked out the areas I saw them just two days earlier, but I never saw them in those areas. I only found them when I moved into areas at least ½ mile away from the nearest used road. That gradually changed over the week, after the weekend-warriors went home, and slowly the elk began returning, bugling earlier and earlier in the evening, until on Thursday, they were almost back to the pre-hunt routine. But then, it all changed again on Friday afternoon when the traffic picked up again for the second and last weekend of the hunt.

In some areas, mileage might not matter much. Perhaps there is less pressure. Perhaps they are more accustomed to routine recreational activities or logging activities. Perhaps the elk behave differently for an unknown reason. I don’t know, as I have only limited experience in such areas. But it’s hard for me to conclude that in high pressure OTC hunts, mileage doesn’t matter. Any elk that isn’t beyond the purview of the road hunters is naturally selected out of the gene pool at worst, or a best, pressured and bumped from that spot.

That’s why my scouting of a new spot here in UT, for the general season, starts with identification of areas where I can hike the half mile + beyond 99% of the other hunters. Plus, I like the solitude.

[DaleL]

Charina good points.

It will be fun to get out and roam.

When it comes to a honey hole, how small of an area or big of an area are we talking about? 100 acres or an entire drainage?