Ya I lost a weekend because of the truck. Really sucked. My wife has a late season cow tag for area 10 so I am sure she will fill our freezer for us.

The NW area is high mountain desert, not much water in the summer. Southern part of the western slope is a lot better.

Denver to Rifle should take around 3 hours, a little less if you push the speed limit and stay with traffic. Oh and weather being good also, you will have two passes to go over that can get snow anytime now.

Our experience with elk in the area has been to drive the truck through the sagebrush and load it whole most of the time. We have skinned and quartered (deboned also) and packed out, not too far though. You can usually get within a 1/2 mile with the truck.

I wasn' t worried about CWD at all. I think they have found one that tested positive over there and it was a road kill, probably sick already. The area was labeled CWD because of the one.