Necessary items in your truck

[ToolMann]

Knife, game bags, pack.

I do always take a shovel and tire chains. Oh, and a cold beer too.

 

[RS_Non-Res]

If I get that whole carcass in the back of my truck, then what am I going to do with it?
Drive home then drag it out onto the ground again and quarter it ...

 

[roadrunner]

Or, make a slide (ramp) out of 2x's and plywood or OSB. Gut the elk and slide it in by the back legs head down. Run a pole through the hocks or shovel handle to slide it in with. Leave the skinning and quartering stuff at home in your garage or shop and do it when you get home.

Simple.

 

[Where's Bruce?]

"Get to the choppah!"

 

[HuntHarder]

Funny, my old man has the same mentality. I can remember him making 4 handles into a long piece of flat strap. He then tied the flatstrap to the bull and we literally pulled the whole damn carcass all the way to the road. Then a little outdoor engineering and we had that bull loaded whole into the pickup. Gotta be an old school thing.

He loves hanging a whole elk in camp and letting it "age."

 

[CRJR45]

I just shot a Elk in the four corner region of Colorado , and it wasn't that far from the road . The guide called the outfitter and he brought his quad . We gutted it there , dragged it to where the quad could get to it and drug it to the guides truck . He had a small winch on the roll bar and put the quad ramps on the back . I winced it while they helped it up the ramps . The guide raised pigs and had a complete butcher shop . He backed the truck up to the door of his shop , lifted it out of the truck with the hanging chain fall mounted on a trolley . Skinned it , split it , and hung it in the walk in , easy peasey .

 

[WoodBow]

Probably the most used thing that getting into backpack hunting taught me is that there is zero need to transport a whole animal ever. Quarter them where they lay and then you don't have a carcass to haul away from your house. But I would probably never convince my 65 year old dad of this who has hung deer to quarter them his entire life.

 

[displacedtexan]

This saturday a friend of mine asked me to help fetch a big cow he shot. I discovered he lacked a few items in his truck for the job.
Try these and you can add to too them.

1. Small electric chainsaw or an arbor saw
2. 10 ft of medium chain with a couple links or clevises to attach it to the loops on eith side of the box
3. A come along/ coffin hoist to winch the elk into the back of the pickup.
4. 20 ft of 1/2 inch hemp rope or equivalent climbing rope. Preferably with a loop in one end
5. A trailer hitch or a unit that can go into a trailer with assembly so you can attach a chain or a rope to it.
6. A couple of medium clevises for attachment to the back of pickup.
7. 15 - 20 ft of medium chain with hooks on at least on end. This is on the basis of things happen.

An elk can be a difficult thing to load without some basic tools.

I'd call a knife a "basic tool", using it would negate the need for 1-7 on your list.

 

[Pony Soldier]

I have a block and tackle with a single tree in my barn. I back in and string them up. I like hanging quarters. If the truck can't get there - I hang my elk between two trees and load them on the horses.

There is no chance that I will waste meat by cutting it up in the field. These methods have worked for me for 59 seasons. Why would I change?

 

[displacedtexan]

Usually people change because they learn an easier or better way.

 

[ToolMann]

Why anyone chooses to drag an elk, ever, especially a mile, is beyond me. I don't drag anything. Much easier to cut and carry.

 

[nphunter]

I have a block and tackle with a single tree in my barn. I back in and string them up. I like hanging quarters. If the truck can't get there - I hang my elk between two trees and load them on the horses.

There is no chance that I will waste meat by cutting it up in the field. These methods have worked for me for 59 seasons. Why would I change?

You're not wasting any meat vs hanging, a lot of times letting a whole carcass hang in a cooler for a week wastes more meat by the time you carve off all of the dry stuff. I've done it both ways, we've come up with all kinds of ways to load elk in the back of vehicles, a front-end loader is by far the easiest, a good friend of the family has a big ranch with a full butcher shop, whenever we kill elk on the ranch they get picked up by the loader, gutted and skinned at the shop, pressure washed, cut in half with a sawzall and hung just like a beef cow.

Personally, for me I never hunt out there for myself and I quarter and pack everything, the last cow my wife killed I was able to get to with the vehicle. I drug the cow to a nice flat spot and quartered her up and tossed her in the back. One major reason I prefer to quarter everything is that I don't have a walk-in cooler and you can't hang an animal in August/September without one. All of my quarters go into a stand-up fridge with all but the top rack removed.

I can tell you that I end up with far more waste when quartering a deer in the field than when I let one hang in a cooler for a week and then cut it up. The fridge doesn't dry the meat out like a cooler and all I am doing is cleaning the meat up when trimming.

I only started quartering animals about 10yrs ago when I started archery hunting when it was hot, I probably killed 20 elk prior to that and have been part of killing well over 100 elk and all of them were dragged and loaded whole, mostly by hand with a group of people. I've seen way more damaged meat by dragging animals for hours by far. After learning how to properly quarter an animal using the gutless meathod the only time I don't do an animal that way is if I'm hunting somewhere where I cannot leave the carcass lying (like in an ag field).

I will also say that a person is really limiting where they hunt by not learning how to break down a bull whole, that bull being boned out was in the bottom of a 1200' deep canyon 3 miles from the closest road which happened to be on top. It would have taken a week to drag that bull out with 10 men. I remember as a kid trying to help a guy drag a bull out whole out of some nasty blowdown, me and my cousin both probably 13 or 14 and my grandpa were trying to help this guy. We probably spent 5hrs dragging that bull and only made it a couple of hundred yards with 3 men and two boys, the weather turned and it was dark, that bull ended up getting left on the mountain to waste, I will never forget that. I've killed bulls in that area since and can have a bull quartered and back to the vehicle in a couple of hours by myself.

My kids' first bull loaded whole.


Here is a bull being totally boned out in the field.

 

[Fitzwho]

Headache rack and a four-wheeler with a winch is the second best method of loading up a large animal into the bed of a truck. That's how my guide in Canada loaded up the moose I shot. Which barely made sense, because there is no way that the wheeler he was on weighed even half of what that moose did.

The best thing I have seen is a buddy of mine that guides elk hunts on a private ranch in New Mexico. They keep a UTV handy to drag elk off the mountain. But he has a flat-bed with a winch mounted at the top of the integrated headache rack. Slurps them right up.

I'm a cut and carry guy. I moved my bull earlier this month out of an oak mott to have some more room to work. But that was all of 15-ft maybe. No way I could have moved him much further without a little more downhill slope and to just start rolling him.

Handy stuff I like to have in the truck on my hunts:
Ryobi 40v Chain Saw
Shovel/Axe
12V air pump and tire repair kit
30-ft tow strap/soft shackles
A couple ratchet straps

The tow strap in conjunction with a ratchet strap (or just a longer/heavy duty ratchet strap) makes for a pretty decent meat pole when you get everything back to camp. If worried about bears setup the straps from the bed of the truck to make it higher.

 

[DeerCatcherUT/CO]

We shot a couple cows about a mile beyond a locked gate on a SWA. Quartered one, and I walked back to the truck to get the plastic sled and start hauling meat. CPW guy was there waiting. Checked my tag, and wanted to go check our kills.
He unlocks the gate and says follow me out in your truck. Fine with me.
Pulls some tissue for a DNA sample off each animal, helps us load them both.
Didn’t even have time to quarter the big one, just gutted. Didn’t even have time to crack a beer.

I can’t imagine loading a whole elk like that again, we did use his ATV ramps but it was all brute force.

View attachment 467348View attachment 467350

Hell yea I know exactly where that is. See you next year

 

[Extrapale]

I just bring a knife and I don't need all that other stuff.

Sent from my SM-G986U using Tapatalk

 

[Roguer53]

Usually people change because they learn an easier or better way.

Sure wish I'd learned other than the hard way...lol

 

[Phaseolus]

Sometimes you just get lucky…out of 20 plus elk this is only the second to come out whole. Late season B list cow tag a half mile from home. It was shot by the junipers in the upper left corner and sledded down with a plastic toboggan.

 

[dtrkyman]

I was invloved in about a dozen Elk kills in 2021, all but one were winched into the back of a pickup and drivin back to camp to hang and quarter/butcher.

Seemed like cheating but I wasn't complaining.

Winch on the headache rack.

 

[elkhunteralta]

Best thing i have learned is the ranchers cell phone number, he rolls in with the tractor scoops it in the bucket and back to hang whole lol. Yes i have quartered out and hauled for miles, but since hunting ranch country have learned one can haul them whole, including that bull in my profile pic. Does it feel less like elk hunting, ya a bit but not getting any younger, and always can recall all the work and sore back from years past lol.

 

[Coues123]

If you've ever taken your 80yo Grandpa hunting, you know your not walking 6 miles in to kill a bull. The OP gives some good advice if you kill one and can get to it in a vehicle.
Biggest challenge I had for one in a vehicle was putting a big cow in the back of a hard top Suzuki Samurai.