My take;
A guy can learn a lot just by watching Youtube.
The Elknut stuff is excellent.
One might think there are elk in every canyon...but then you hear Cory Jacobson mention they covered 12 miles that day.....illuminating. Key to elk hunting is finding them....and the best way to do that is lace up your boots and cover some ground.
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I am no expert by any stretch of the imagination but I echo what Beendare said.
Last September was my first elk hunt DIY OTC in one of the most heavily pressured Colorado units at least that is what I have read.
After deciding the year before we were going I spent as much time as I could and still function reading everything I could on forums like this, getting the ElkNut app, watching the early Gritty Podcasts especially the ones with Aron Snyder and Corey Jacobsen. Watching the Born and Raised videos as well as the Randy Newberg videos not so much for what they said but to see the type of terrain they hunted and how they set up and elk talk podcasts. Watched a ton of videos on OnX best practices and spent well over 100 hours on w-scouting.
Being a guy from NJ, never being out there to scout or hunt anything other than whitetails we had low expectations. We had the following goals. To hear an elk bugle, have an elk respond to my calling either by calling back or coming in, seeing an elk and ultimately killing one. We had 8 days cleared to hunt plus 2 days driving on each side to get there and home. Within 10 minutes of pulling off the highway to my #1 spot I had 3 bulls bugling from the next ridge over! Goal number one met! At dark I bugled and had 5 respond! The 3 we heard when we got there and two farther down the drainage! Goal number two met within the first 3 hours of being in Colorado. The next day we scouted and figured out a route to get to where we heard the first bulls calling and they called back to me the one time I called them about 10 am the day before the opener.
Opening morning we called near the bottom of the drainage creek crossing and had an elk respond farther downstream so we followed down only to get cliffed out. Turned around and met at the creek crossing a successful local who got a cow from exactly where we had originally planned. Talking with him he was shocked to see us because he had hunted that drainage for ten years and had only seen his friends that were on their way to help him pack it out. While talking we discussed my top 5 spots to try and he told me we had really done our homework because he had killed elk in 4 of them! He gave us some tips on how to get I to two of my spots for easier access and since he was packing out where we had planned to go we decided to give it a couple days rest.
The second day of the season we went in the morning the route he gave me for my second spot and found a lot of sign but probably a week old and no elk. We went to another area and at the trail head met 3 guys from Michigan. One had been coming for 5 years and had only seen one elk in that time the other two had been coming for 3 years and never saw or heard any.
Day 3 we plan on going back to where we were going on the opener and as I went to put on my pack I threw my back out. We didn’t hunt that morning and went for breakfast in town. As we ate my back started feeling better but I wasn’t comfortable going down the original drainage since it was 1000 foot vertical drop in less than 1/3 of a mile. So we went to my 4th spot and found a well used watering hole and sat it for a couple of hours and had a cow coming down the ridge towards us and at about 80 yards the wind which had been very steady swirled and blew our scent to her and she went back over the ridge. Goal number 3 accomplished!
Day 4 our hunt got cut short when my son woke up with altitude sickness. We went into town for 4 hours which was about 2000 feet lower but he wasn’t feeling any better so I had to make the decision to cut the hunt short or possibly have him end up in the hospital or worse. So in what turned out to be a long weekend two guys from NJ with no guidance from anyone almost got it done. I am confident that with enough time and a little luck we can be successful!
Good luck!
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