I note that you didn't exclude the possibility of paying for the fully-guided, fully-outfitted elk hunt. While expensive, there are some advantages to this if you can manage to pay for it. Just because your first elk hunt would be a guided/outfitted hunt wouldn't mean that your second, third, etc., elk hunt would have to be. Think of this first elk hunt as a training/learning opportunity. If you pay attention and ask questions, you will learn a lot on this first hunt. What kind of country do elk prefer. How do you cut an elk up. What works. What doesn't work. What kind of an animal is an elk. How do you heat a tent. How do you get fire wood. How do you get drinking water. What kind of camp arrangements work. How do you move in the mountains in October? All kinds of things that I can't think of right off hand.

If you learned enough on this trip, you could buy yourself an outfit and go DIY in the future. Buy a canvas wall tent. Buy a wood stove. Buy a kitchen set up (can be simple, often DIY hunters are eating simply because they don't cook breakfast in the morning, as they are getting on the trails and don't cook dinner at night because it is late and they are tired. Maybe at night they are warming up canned soup of frozen chili brought from home.). Buy lanterns. You will need elk hunting companions for this DIY situation. So be thinking of who of your friends can do this kind of future DIY hunt with you. It generally takes 2 weeks of time -- time driving, time setting up camp, time hunting, time tearing down camp, and time driving back home. Which of your friends would make that time commitment.

When you get to the point of fully DIY -- and I suppose this is true even when going fully guided/fully outfitted -- you will need to pick a place to hunt. This means both the game management unit (GMU) you will hunt, the season, and where specifically within that GMU you plan to hunt. Some of the considerations are in early seasons, the elk are up high so don't apply in an area where there is no high country. In late seasons the elk are low, and low usually means private land and very, very expensive fees paid to land owners to hunt elk on their land. Other considerations are how long does it take to draw a permit -- 1 year, 5 years, 20 years? This information can be gleaned from reading the data on the state fish and game web sites or, in some cases, getting a CD from the state that contains that data. Be advised that Colorado has the most elk and is the easiest to draw in. If you are looking to hunt trophies, probably other states are better bets. At the same time, trophy units usually take many years to draw in -- you have to apply year after year and accumulate preference points. If you are into trophies, maybe you could apply in a trophy state and accumulate points while applying in Colorado for easy draw units and hunting for non-trophy elk, such as a cow elk.