Originally Posted by
redgreen
I know my areas that I hunt them real well. They are creatures of habit, and I carry a pile of chain and rope in case I have to pull them out of some God forsaken place. Even a downhill drag is a real bummer for a large bull. Now that I have aged a little, I tend to pass on them if I can't get near them with my 4x4. I have seen herds of over 100, but also have cracked many a loner too. Best eating wild meat there is,and the holiday is over when it is down.
I dragged my first elk across a steep muddy slope to some tree shade where there was snow left over. My plan was to cut the elk into pieces and then pack it in the snow until I could fetch it the next day. That plan worked.
The trail was about 100 feet below that cache of meat. I climbed the 100 feet to the meat and packed down a quarter at a time on a pack, over steep, slippery ground. That was four trips. It now occurs to me that it would have been better to drag the elk as far as possible down that slope. If I had only been able to drag it down to 50 feet above the trail . . . that would have saved half the distance of my trips fetching the meat.
Normally you can't drag a whole elk, but the slope of the hill and the muddiness (melted snow wet the ground) made this possible in this case.
I suppose even if you can't drag the whole elk, if you could drag the quarters, that might be better than carrying them in some circumstances. Some sort of skid mechanism would be needed or a piece of heavy plastic or a tarp. My partners and I once put elk quarters on heavy plastic and slid it down from the kill site to a sheltered area.