With wolves, some grizzly bears, black bears, cougar and coyotes, I like taking my bucks out whole and then cleaning them at home, I also like weighing all my whitetails. Elk are 3 to 4x the size of a whitetail which makes it much tougher to get an elk out whole. Unless your very close to a road or have a chainsaw winch, this is pretty tough, not to mention the TIME it takes to get an elk out in the early archery season (not wanting any of the meat to spoil) so with elk we usually don't even gut them in remote areas, we take the quarters, tenderloins, backstraps, and neck/rib meat. leaving the guts untouched.

I have never had any problems with this. Our group has several times shot deer out of the same stand just a few days apart. A couple of times even on the same day.

I live about 1/2 a mile from my stand, I usually tag it then put it on the 4 wheeler take it home, gut it in the bucket of the John Deere.

Never seems to deter any deer as far as I have personally observed. There have been instances like others have mentioned, taking a deer shortly after a gut pile has been devoured by the scavengers. Our piles last a day at the most. There are plenty of critters that have benefitted from our piles. They just come thru the area like nothing had happened. Just my personal obsevations.

Here in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest . . . gut piles don't last long enough to have any impact at all.

Gut piles don't seem to affect deer what-so-ever, from what I've seen. I've had mature deer step right over top of a gut pile that is an hour old. This just doesn't seem to be a smell that alarms them.