Ever since deer season has gone out, myself and 3 buddies from Auburn have been getting serious about a trip we’ve toyed with for the past 2 years. It’s official – we will be spending the latter half of the 2012 archery elk season chasing bulls in southwestern Colorado’s wilderness. Not only that, we hope to draw a couple archery mule deer tags and will be carrying black bear tags as well. Little bit of a smorgasbord (pun intended…), but the focus of the trip will be elk.
One of my buddies and leader of the hunt, Pete Acker, has been putting together a great blog that will document every step of our journey from getting physically prepared through a variety of intense Crossfit-esque workouts to putting together our gear lists to doing map intel and preparing backcountry food items. You can visit his blog at elkprep.blogspot.com. As organizer/leader of the hunt, Pete has successfully taken elk in this area of Colorado before and we will be retracing a few of the same steps that he and a buddy took 4 years ago.
The style of our hunt will be extreme in every respect.
*Duration – we’re cutting out nearly 3 weeks of our calendars to make this trip a reality.
*Terrain – we’ve picked some of the most rugged units of Colorado to call home for those 3 weeks and then we are going to go where man and beast (pack horses) dare not travel. I’ll illustrate some of the avalanche chutes that we are looking to climb into alpine drainages – Google Earth’s 3-dimensional depictions are humbling to say the least! The physical aspect of this hunt is going to be punishing, but nothing worth having comes easy.
*Hunt style – this is going to be new to all of us, but we plan on executing approximately 4 mini-hunts. 4 or 5 days putting on 8-12 miles a day in roadless wilderness areas. Hunting gear, camp, food and water riding on each man’s back and never having to retrace our steps to a parking area let alone a spike camp. Move to find the elk and then dog them until it’s time to pack meat back to the vehicle. By necessity, this means equipping with the best, lightest weight gear we can get our hands on. Nothing is going along because of a name brand, only because we believe it’s the best piece of equipment to get the job done.
*Financial expense – extremely low. Anyone can afford this hunt. We’ve got it figured to cost less than $1,000 per person depending on whether or not you decide to purchase mule deer or bear tags in addition to the $579 elk tag.
*Adventure factor – this is fairly obvious and a bit of a cheesy element to explicitly list, but I think you can already get the feeling that the adventure factor is out the roof!
There will be a flood of posts the next 6 months as we prepare for, anticipate, and complete this hunting adventure and I hope that Pete and I’s blog becomes a great resource for those of you if you are attempting similar feats or if you just want to pull a few of the great pointers out that we’ll feed your way. I’ll link to his blog occasionally and vice versa as the story of 2012 DIY Colorado elk hunt unfolds.
Either way, blog material is at an all-time high (bass fishing and turkey hunting are even heating up!) and there are more exciting opportunities on my horizon that I’ll be talking about soon.
For a starting place, read his blog post about the other 2 guys undertaking this hunt.