Alsatian

I wasn't clear enough. I was only talking about dragging the elk a short distance. In the example I was talking about, my camp was 2.5 miles or so away from the kill. But there was a relatively decent trail without much elevation change between the camp and near the kill site. After I field dressed my elk, I dragged him over the open slope where he dropped to a shaded area where there was snow. That's where I skinned him and cut him into bone-in quarters and stowed in game bags. I buried the game bags in snow to cool. I came back the next day, with hunting partners, to pack them back to camp.

The way we set up the work, I fetched the quartered elk meat from the cache in the snow and packed it on a pack frame down to the trail. It was a climb of about 100 feet maybe 150 feet from the trail. that is not a lot of climbing. But about the time I was making my third climb up to that spot to fetch another load . . . I was feeling a little tired. Not exhausted, just tired.

In retrospect, I'm just thinking it would have been yet more clever to have skidded that elk all the way down to the trail or have skidded the pieces of elk meat down to the trail rather than packing them.

It also happened to be the case that the ground was steep and slippery from my cache down to the trail. I did slip once, and tweaked my knee. I could easily see how that -- slip with a 60 LBS load on your back -- could blow out your knee.

So I'm just musing about other tricks or ideas that could have made that easier on myself. The prospect of skidding the elk meat off the steep hillside to the trail rather than packing it off the steep hillside to the trail seems like it could be an improvement. I hunt this same area often, and I could easily be in this same scenario again.