remington30

I am planning to hunt the rios this year in the south fork area, has anyone got any info. I think i will be staying at Grandview cabins and hunting unit 79 or 80.

OakmanMS

Remington30,

What season are you planning to hunt (archery is quite different from 4th rifle)? Are you hunting deer, elk, or both? Also, unless CDOW reverses itself, Unit 79 is a draw only quality elk management unit (as of last year).

Best of luck.

remington30

I am looking to hunt the first rifle season if drawn. My first choice is unit 80. I am a first time elk hunter but have killed a lot of whitetails, a few muleys and antelope and collected a moose in Quebec last year. I will be hunting out of one of the local camps or cabins in the south fork area.

OakmanMS

I guess that I should have also asked if you are familiar with the area and terrain around South Fork. You will need to be in reasonably good shape, as you will be hunting at elevations from about 7,800ft at the valley floor up to 12,000+ft. If the weather is still warm to hot, as it has been the past few years, then the elk will probably still be at the higher elevations. You can also expect a lot of company, even in the early elk only season. That area has good access and can be covered pretty well from either South Fork or Del Norte. I won' t discourage you by saying that it will be so full of people that you will need to carry your own rock if you want a place to sit, but I have seen it that way in the later seasons. If you don' t already have the USFS topo and the USGS quadrangles for the area, you should get them and familiarize yourself with them. This will help in finding areas that you might want to hunt, and it may help you keep from getting lost. I was archery hunting there six years ago and we had a guy from Arkansas show up at our camp at dusk; he was out of water, throwing up from altitude shckness, and completely lost. When we finally figured out where his camp was, we realized that not only was he over ten miles from where he thought he was, he was almost fourteen miles from his camp. This is an extreme case, but it certainly points out the need for orienteering ability or a good GPS. Well, I seem to have become too verbose, so I' ll shut up now. Feel free to drop me an email, and I' ll answer any questions that I can. Good hunting.