Driftrider,

Good for you and welcome in advance. You'll find Colorado is a wonderful state given it's millions of acres of beautiful public land. You'll find an investment in computer mapping software and a GPS to be a big help in efficiently exploring your new, and I might add, very different home. Compared to a lot of mountain states Colorado has a lot of roads criss-crossing the place, but even at that you are very likely to find yourself and your kill a long ways away from the road with some mean hiking between you and the truck. (In the area I hunt, ATV's are NOT allowed to leave the maintained road, Thank God.)

You know you are hunting BIG game when you can't move it once you've killed it (not more than a couple feet). A lot of game goes to waste each year because hunters come to hunt but have not come to grips with the "transport" problem you have identified, so I commend you for thinking about that in advance. The basic keys to getting them out comes in two parts: (1) being ready, willing, and able to "make little parts out of big parts." Use either the Alaskan method or the traditional field dressing method and then further reduce the animal to pieces that are managable in terms of weight and size. Quartering is a common step. Deboning the carcass completely is a common back packers route; and (2) having the raw "power" to physically haul it out in reliable fashion by one means or another.

Personally I recommend horses. Nothing says "big game hunting" like horses and wall tents (the wall tents are a seperate story). You can either rent your own horses (Sombrero Ranches, but you'll need your own panniers) and then you can either hunt with them (leave them tied up in the woods close to where you are hunting) or leave them in camp until you need them. Another worthy route, especially in your first years elk hunting, is to make arrangements with a packer/outfitter who also operates in your general area to get your kill out for you. The $200 to $400 per elk may sound steep, but it is some of the best money you can spend IMHO.

On the other hand, if you have failed to damage your knees in high school or college athletics and/or you are wanting to que up for an early heart attack or you simply want add additional pain, suffering, and exhaustion on top of what you already endured to just shoot the darned thing, then the backpack method may be best.

If you decide to use back packs, then I would recommend that you leave the backstraps for the last trip as that will make sure you actually make all the trips in and out until the task is acthally done. Some folks fail to recognize that repeated trips with a 75 pound pack in even mild terrain or pulling a sled on dry ground may or may not be physcially doable for them and then we find abandoned front shoulder quarters still hanging in the tree next to the gut pile.

In any case, I predict you're going to love it out here. Coming from Iowa, I am sure you will be able to handle the cold, but please bear in mind that it is a big, big, big place and you don't want to be needing to call 911 because help can be a long time in arriving. The big game and the scenery easily offset the downsides though. I predict that in a few years, returning to Iowa for white tail hunting, though okay for heritage and social reasons, will seem quite tame, and will likely slide waaaaay down on your list of hunting priorities. Good luck and welcome to Colorado.