Colorado Elk Hunting - Where You Hunt a Mile above the Rest - And Certainly Closer to Heaven! Our Goal: To give back to the future generations of hunters what we so greatly enjoyed: It took a lifetime to observe elk in the wilderness. We have decided to pass on our "tricks of the trade" for new hunters, since it would be heartless to take our knowledge to the grave. It is time to give back the hunting joys we experienced. I want people to look back on their lives and say that they were extremely successful in living. I wish they reap the many riches we accumulated, most of which cannot be bought. Chasing meaningless wealth may prove to be an empty objective compared to the riches that life offers. It is time to pass on our philosophy and hunting legacy to a younger generation to enjoy. I hope that this site will inspire hunters to leave the tedium of vehicle hunting and stretch into wilderness hunting. I hope that will be families like mine, who can bond in unforgettable experiences. This they can do if they are prepared and comfortable enough to enjoy the solitude and beauty. May readers be able to look back on a long life and say as we can, “I would live my life over again, every wonderful outdoor second of it!” Enticing New and Younger Hunters in the Field: Hunting remote, high altitude areas for elk, deer and bear hunting requires a lot of preparation, outdoors experience, endurance, and self- confidence. We have witnessed many hunters leaving the wilderness because they came unprepared and with the wrong equipment. Many elk hunting books focus on tactics for scouting, tracking and harvesting elk. Unfortunately, many articles are focused just on the moments of kill. Few offer a complete, practical field guide to remote wilderness hunting, especially hunting at high altitudes. I saw this discrepancy and decided to write the basics from vehicle preparation, to altitude hazards, and to elk and animal behaviors. The successful hunter applies all his knowledge of nature. The literature fails to disclose the many facets of the hunt, which results in success. There are "tricks of the trade" not mentioned in typical magazine articles. Our family consistently found and harvested elk and deer. I would love to hear from you in a year or two that your family decided to get into the back country, and that you had been successful and happy with the endeavor. May you and your family also prosper in hunting memories, which can be much sweeter than the meat! Preparing Hunters for High Altitude Hunting Success: I wrote this book especially for neophyte high altitude hunters based on what I've witnessed in over four decades hunting up there. ​Hunters at 8,000 to 12,000 feet altitude are often not mentally optimally “crisp". They fail to realize that oxygen deficiency subtly befuddles their minds and makes them less conscious of details of their surroundings. They can miss subtle but important clues that portend game presence. Unfortunately, we witnessed out-of- state hunters spend small fortunes on what they expect will be a lifetime hunt, only to go home tired, discouraged and without game. Like John Prine sings, "old Joe is often seven miles from where he is at". Or in bar speak, "two drinks does not affect my consciousness.” Everything in magazine articles is made to seem so effortless and easy, until you go on the internet blogs and see the disappointments and misery many hunters had. Sometimes I see general "check lists" provided by guides, but rarely do they give important details that only experience provides. Much of the hunting magazine and book literature does not seen to be up to date with new research findings. No hunter should ever stop learning. Exposing New Animal Behavior and Hunting Science: A final website objective is to add addenda articles. So much new science is being discovered. The precious experiences and wonders of elk hunting should be shared. Maybe I can influence some others to hunt successfully as we have. That means having an easy, enjoyable, safe experience resulting with bringing prime, healthy, delicious meat on the table. And precious cascade of memories! Encouraging Honourable, Ethical, Fair Chase Hunting, not Sick Sport Shooting: A final objective of this website and to correct the often misperceptions the public has of hunters. Constant television and movie violence involving firearms bombards us. Excessive pressure advertising for high tech arms, ATVs and brutish trucks further sours public opinions about hunting. Hunting magazines feature page after page of gory kill photographs and bragging hunter stories detailing the killing aspect of a hunt. Smiling, insensitive hunters display the "slaughtered" (as the public see it) prey for self-glorification on vehicles and in parking lots. Now there is a new entry for unethical hunting - computer gun sights that make all compensations and guide the bullet to the animal. Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot the tied bear, but gun manufacturers fixated on profits are “marching for money, reasoning "what does it matter how the animal dies?" Then there are the rednecks of the “1,000 Yard Plus Club” which uses a mega gun with three operators to blast animals over half a mile away with large bullets. That certainly is group hunting. For legitimate sport shooters, a cardboard target would provide the same technical satisfaction as crippling or gut-blasting an unsuspecting animal. That is not fair chase hunting! Some mega-buck sickies sit on their asses in New York even use computer-controlled guns on Texas game farms to kill animals. PETA and other animal rights organizations use these observations to easily disparage and lobby against the historically legitimate and humane hunting. The result is that the public has come to conceive (and believe) hunting as a macho, wild-west buffalo shoot, the-animals-have-no-defense, that hunting is an unrestrained killing orgy. We humans can strive to do better than that! Packing into the Flat Tops for October elk hunt, 1979

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