Opening morning of my elk hunt this year had the elk fully in the rut. We called a bull from quite a ways off to about 15 yards where he stopped looking in our direction and let fly with a wonderful bugle. We gave one "squeak" of the call and he continued toward us stopping 5 yards to my right looking right at me. At this point I was feeling a bit uneasy with such a large critter so close. Not wanting to startle him I just did a bit of a "Groucho Marx" with my eyebrows and he turned and trotted away. A couple of days later another hunter was intrigued by the description I gave of the bull so tried to find him. She did quite a ways down the river from where we called him in. She dropped him after calling him into 150 yards or so. Here he is.



As homely as he looks he had quite a collection of bulls around him.

I did my first elk hunt last year. Went with 7 other guys to unit 65 (west fork of Cimmaron in the Uncompadhre national forest.) between Montrose and Ooray Colorado. I found out I was not a public lands elk hunter. At least not the way we did it. We scouted for two days and hunted for five more in blizzard conditions. Drove 2200 miles, slept in a tent with five other guys. One had prostate problems and had to get up and pee in a coffe can every hour and could never remember where he put his flashlight. The guys I was with were older and wanted to come in at noon every day. So we walked in for two hours in the am, came back in at noon to get a sandwich, then head back at two and spend two more hours walking back in to come back to camp at dark, eat and be in bed by 8:30pm so we could get up at 3:30 to eat and walk back in in the AM. Saw five cow elk the first fifteen minutes on the first morning. We had agreed to let the guys with the cow tags take the first shot on cows. Problem is they didn't take the shot. I could have nailed a cow at 300 yds, but the guy I was with didn't want to take a 300 yd shot. I never saw another elk during the next five days. Only one of the eight of us took an elk.
If I'd have seen the elk in the picture above on the fourth or fifth day I would have taken him in a heartbeat.
GWB

Boxhead, was that bull taken in Colorado? I saw his twin in the back of a red pickup truck near Montrose a few days ago.