My buddy drew a CO gmu61 tag this year.

so i bailed on all my archery tags the last week of season and drove the 6 hours over to his camp to hunt tuesday-end of season.

he hunted 16 or 17 days this season, passing on a 315" bull after spotting a giant 370" class bull. that big bull was killed by a mz hunter the next weekend and green scores 367". the weekend before i got there he was solo and had a 320" class bull at 15 yards but had his vitals covered by trees, and saw another 340" class bull.

this unit is insane. took him i think 14 years to get the tag, and i think he had around 30 bulls in bow range over the course of the season.

in the end, the last saturday morning, we spotted a giant herd bull with about 30 cows (350" or so). going up the mountain we called in a nice 5x6 that came in so fast i couldnt get the montana decoy up, he bolted after not seeing the cow that was calling him in.

20 minutes later, as we're still going up the mountain on another bench... the caller brought in the 6x6 that i have on film... he stayed around for the MT decoy, and helped to bring in a bigger 6x6 that my buddy shot a few seconds after this video ends. unfortunately, the bull had me pinned and i was afraid to move to try and film the shot on the bigger bull. the bigger guy you can hear on the video coming in screaming. he was about 25 yards 90deg to my left. it was intense.

it wasn't the big monster we were after, he's about a 300-305" bull. but it was an unreal hunt with a good friend and i'm happy he filled his tag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaGh45AnAAQ

i'll edit together the hunt video later. i wanted to get this up since it was a cool shot.

Very cool!

John when you get any chance at a decent shot on a 6pt bull elk you'd damned well better take it and not be playing that magazine writers crap of passing one up for something bigger later. 99% of the time it just won't pan out as hoped.

George

George i'd shoot that bull every year for the next decade. but that tag my buddy had took 14 years, and he had several bulls bigger than him in bow range. it's an unreal unit over on the western side of the state.

Mighty steep in some parts too. Don't know just where you were. I hunted '97 at the base of Lizard Head W/A. Believe there was enough elk around. Saw some saucer sized tracks. It was the snows that was unbelievable.

We rode horses across a 1/4 mile meadow in one hell of a storm. Got to the edge of the canyon and decided it was falling too hard to go on. Turned around and rode back down our trail. Snow was 18" and by the time we got 200 yards we couldn't see any evidence we'd just been there. Next morning it was over 3' and we stayed in camp.

Over by LaJara Res. When it snows, it dumps too. But, when it's 2-3' deep early morning, we go anyway. Chained up 4x's. By 1 or 2 it's down to less than a foot. One year it snowed like that almost every night and never did build up much over crotch deep in the timber. 20 of us in the camp area got 19 elk. I left on Monday, and was the only one that didn't get one.

My first year there it was dry as a bone and only 3 elk killed by 30-40 hunters in the area. I left on Thursday. Next season started that Sat. By Tuesday they'd had 7 feet! Lot of guys left everything in camp and flew out by rescue chopper. It didn't thaw enough to get back in until March. Man I was glad to of missed that as I was in a tent that year. Bought a trailer the next spring.

Most years there it's too dry for even any elk to be down. No use even going unless there's heavy early snows. When there has been, lots of elk around.

Nice little video you posted. Let's see more.
Assume you ate your tag this year?

George