What does a bull track look like?

[SonnyDay]

@Dark timber beat me to it... and I'll admit that I am a relative newcomer to elk hunting... but we tracked the elk in my photo above for several hundred yards and I shot him about 10 minutes after he made that very track!

But to your point @Indian Summer there were tracks in both directions of various ages so we knew we were "in elk." We also knew the approximate age of every track (in hours) since we had seen them all develop after the recent snow.

This bull's tracks were crazy fresh so we knew he was very close by. But it was more the luck of being in elk in the first place than some amazing tracking skills on my part.

 

[Indian Summer]

@Dark timber beat me to it... and I'll admit that I am a relative newcomer to elk hunting... but we tracked the elk in my photo above for several hundred yards and I shot him about 10 minutes after he made that very track!

But to your point @Indian Summer there were tracks in both directions of various ages so we knew we were "in elk." We also knew the approximate age of every track (in hours) since we had seen them all develop after the recent snow.

This bull's tracks were crazy fresh so we knew he was very close by. But it was more the luck of being in elk in the first place than some amazing tracking skills on my part.

Give yourself some credit. You obviously did something right. Congrats.

 

[Fowl Play]

I take one of these pictures with every bull a buddy or I shoot. At least for me, if an elk track is roughly the distance from my thumb to the tip of my pointer finger, when I make an "L" shape.... it's a good bull. That's roughly 5" long. A cow will be noticeably shorter.

 

[squirrel]

Lots of good tips in the above comments and some total BS. Most of the good tips should be prefaced with "most all of the time"... As in 51%-99% of the time xyz is true.
Elk tracking is VERY exciting and VERY physically demanding, MOST of the time!! One thing for sure you will learn a pile about elk even on days you don't catch up.

You will be able to tell when the addiction has reached full bloom when you start BACK tracking elk to see what they DID. In addition to forward tracking to see what they are going to do.

As far as your original question of sexing a track. There are lots of "usually" this means a bull. But there are several that are virtually 100 % guarantees. When you find where he polished his horns on a tree (usually right before he beds down), yep that's a bull.

When he pisses its about a 95% sure thing when he's standing or walking. Pretty close to 100 % ID when he pees the bed (and they are chronic bedwetters). I have found every bed pissed in by a herd that hadn't been bedded for more than a half hour.

Beware it gets a bit tricky in that with 4pt or better restrictions and bull calves and spikes have official bull plumbing, just not the legal maturity required you may end up tracking for miles just to find a spike with really big feet, its part of the game, sometimes they win after all.

Hope this helps, I could write a book about adventures tracking elk, maybe some day I will. I do know it was a lot more fun when I was 25 instead of 65. But shooting a mature bull in his bed while he chews his cud is pretty damn near priceless, if you aren't excited by that you took up the wrong hobby.

 

[Still Hunter]

.... I do know it was a lot more fun when I was 25 instead of 65.

I doubt it was more fun at 25 , but it was definitely a whole lot easier at 25!!

 

[Indian Summer]

What do you mean “you don’t track elk”? I guess me and all the old guys that taught me everything have been doing it wrong lol. I hunt timber mostly, and that’s what you do if you want to kill.

I used to do that. Pick a chunk of country and hunt it. However it had to be hunted. In western Montana that meant still hunting because it was all timber. So much timber that the elk didn’t focus on open areas because there just weren’t many. Sitting on the edge of a meadow early or late rarely resulted in dead elk.

My brother and many friends up there still do that. Par for the course is killing a bull every other year. Or every 3. You get busted by elk who see you first most of the time. You learn a lot about elk. But you don’t kill as many as you could if you knew they were there before you moved in for a shot opportunity.

These days I start by picking country that I can hunt the way I want to hunt. Places where I can glass from vantage points and see bulls who have no clue I’m there. I can see other groups of cows that might bust me on my way over. I can take the time to make a solid plan. Sometimes that plan means being in the money spot that evening. Sometimes it means the next day. If they are in a spot that makes a stalk impossible it means waiting until they make a move.

If for some reason the plan means going over there and tracking them I know which direction to come from, whether the bull was in the front of the herd or picking up the rear, and most importantly I know when it’s time to slow down to a snail’s pace and have my gun ready to rock and start looking for that one eyeball or antler tine. No more spooking the elk that are so hard to find. No more skipping a year between dead elk. They don’t know I’m there until one falls over dead. That’s way better than having them bust me sneaking through a bedding zone while I leave my scent there ruining it for the next day too.