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Big Deal Hunt: Pursuit of elk brings wilderness home to hunter
By Tim Renken Of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
06/01/2002
Shooting an animal is a secondary goal for us in this hunt. Our primary goal is having a mountain wilderness experience. That's why we choose to hunt elk, the very symbol of wilderness wildlife.
Elk are big, handsome, wild and wary and they live in some of the most rugged, beautiful country in the world, the Rocky Mountains from the deserts of the Southwest to western Canada. Rocky Mountain elk are medium-sized as North American cervids go. Bulls average 700 pounds, cows 525. By comparison, the biggest white-tailed deer weigh 300 pounds, and most bucks are less than half that.
No big-game trophy hunter has credentials without a set of elk antlers. This member of the deer family even has a prestigious club dedicated to its welfare, the 132,000-member Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Elk once populated most of what is now the United States. Estimates of the population before Columbus are about 10 million. Elk were abundant in both the Midwest and East. Some experts say that the elk here in those days were a sub-species known as the Eastern. Others say they were the same species, with mountain elk a bit larger.
The Lewis and Clark party shot and ate 111 elk on its two-year expedition across the West in 1805-06. They refer to elk in the journals more than 600 times and saw many thousands in the valleys and mountains on both sides of the Continental Divide.
U.S. development was hard on the elk. Just 100,000 or so existed in 1907 after 150 years of relentless hunting and habitat destruction. By 1927, that was down to 97,000 head, most of them in national and provincial parks in the U.S. and Canada. Most historic habitat had no elk at all.
Conservation and restoration efforts for elk, as for deer and many other species, began in the 1930s. With elk mostly from Yellowstone Park, all mountain states and provinces began stocking elk. Like deer, the elk responded and began to rebound.
Colorado led the way. Its herd grew from less than 2,000 to more than 250,000 by last year. In some areas of Colorado now there are more elk than the state biologists deem ideal.
Many Midwestern and Eastern states, including Arkansas and Kentucky, now have small elk herds. In recent years, the Missouri Conservation Commission, heeding calls from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, considered building a small herd in the Ozarks. Last year, though, the idea was scrapped because of the fear of spreading disease to the state's wild deer.
In a search for places to go elk hunting, a Midwesterner finds many different kinds of places and different kinds of hunting.
Next: Something for almost everyone.
******
This is the fifth in a series that will appear every other Sunday, about a once-in-a-lifetime elk hunt my son and I will make, our Big Deal Hunt.
By Tim Renken Of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
06/01/2002
Shooting an animal is a secondary goal for us in this hunt. Our primary goal is having a mountain wilderness experience. That's why we choose to hunt elk, the very symbol of wilderness wildlife.
Elk are big, handsome, wild and wary and they live in some of the most rugged, beautiful country in the world, the Rocky Mountains from the deserts of the Southwest to western Canada. Rocky Mountain elk are medium-sized as North American cervids go. Bulls average 700 pounds, cows 525. By comparison, the biggest white-tailed deer weigh 300 pounds, and most bucks are less than half that.
No big-game trophy hunter has credentials without a set of elk antlers. This member of the deer family even has a prestigious club dedicated to its welfare, the 132,000-member Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Elk once populated most of what is now the United States. Estimates of the population before Columbus are about 10 million. Elk were abundant in both the Midwest and East. Some experts say that the elk here in those days were a sub-species known as the Eastern. Others say they were the same species, with mountain elk a bit larger.
The Lewis and Clark party shot and ate 111 elk on its two-year expedition across the West in 1805-06. They refer to elk in the journals more than 600 times and saw many thousands in the valleys and mountains on both sides of the Continental Divide.
U.S. development was hard on the elk. Just 100,000 or so existed in 1907 after 150 years of relentless hunting and habitat destruction. By 1927, that was down to 97,000 head, most of them in national and provincial parks in the U.S. and Canada. Most historic habitat had no elk at all.
Conservation and restoration efforts for elk, as for deer and many other species, began in the 1930s. With elk mostly from Yellowstone Park, all mountain states and provinces began stocking elk. Like deer, the elk responded and began to rebound.
Colorado led the way. Its herd grew from less than 2,000 to more than 250,000 by last year. In some areas of Colorado now there are more elk than the state biologists deem ideal.
Many Midwestern and Eastern states, including Arkansas and Kentucky, now have small elk herds. In recent years, the Missouri Conservation Commission, heeding calls from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, considered building a small herd in the Ozarks. Last year, though, the idea was scrapped because of the fear of spreading disease to the state's wild deer.
In a search for places to go elk hunting, a Midwesterner finds many different kinds of places and different kinds of hunting.
Next: Something for almost everyone.
******
This is the fifth in a series that will appear every other Sunday, about a once-in-a-lifetime elk hunt my son and I will make, our Big Deal Hunt.
