Years ago in the high country and Colorado must have been about 9,500 feet elevation.

I was hunting with a small group among which was a 11 year old young man hunting with a 243. It was loaded with a hundred grain

Remington corelocked bullets and he took a shot at about 200 yards on a nice five-point bull elk standing on the rim of a canyon.

The bull basically dropped in his tracks, wobbled and dropped. So of course they celebrated

the dad took the rifle from the 11 year old young man, cleared the chamber, and in

fact I believe he unloaded the rifle and they went to collect their elk.

As they approached, so this is at least two or three minutes later,

this bull jumped up and bailed off into that canyon.

There's about a foot, a foot and a half of snow. It was a November hunt and that elk

went about 250 yards down off the side of that canyon before he stopped and basically died on his feet

bailing down into that deep canyon. There's a lot of deadfall on the side of that

canyon and it was steep. So we had to go down in there with packs and cut him up and then

carry him out in the dark in quite a lot of snow that was covering a lot of deadfalls. It was very treacherous footing, especially when you've got

60 to 100 pounds of meat on your back, right? And we expected that bullet placement must not have been as good as it looked when the bull first

dropped, but when we got there, he put his shot on the X.

It just hadn't killed that bull very quickly. Killed him, but it took four minutes maybe. In the last 30 seconds of that he was going full throttle downhill into rough country and we went from what should

have been a very easy recovery and some nice daylight photos to a rather strenuous and even somewhat dangerous, you know, for those of us that were a little bit older,

climbing out there in the snow, the dead fall, and so forth.

We got it done, it turned into a great adventure. The young man got his elk but it was a

classic case of not a big enough hammer to drive that nail in my opinion now most of you longtime

listeners know that I'm a proponent of using plenty of authority to hunt elk and

certain other species and we're going to talk about this topic today. I have Colton Heward here with me and he's been

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