When dawn came yesterday it was cold it was negative 8 degrees and I was hunched over my 15 power binocular glassing a little basin just about frozen.

But as the light crept over the mountains and drifted down across the valley bottoms,

it showed me four bull elk on the far side of the basin, and one of them was a genuine big bull. He was 360 plus, heavy, beautiful,

beautiful bull and suddenly it didn't seem nearly so cold anymore.

I'm Joseph von Benedict and this is the backcountry hunting podcast and today I want to talk a little bit about late season elkhunting, some challenges you'll face and

some techniques that will help you overcome those.

Now, man, I don't know that there's a type of elkunning that is more challenging than

late seasonal cunning unless you have private land with a lot of winter feed and that's a different story entirely. In the late season you

got a lot of different facets that you'll face, hunting challenges and so forth and

finding a big bull can be very very difficult.

So let's look at a few of these.

First, by then, and we're talking, let's say, the end of October and most of November,

right?

The bulls are going to be alone or in small bachelor groups.

Okay, at least the mature bulls.

Now, the cows and calves are gathering into nursery herds. This is for

protection against predators and to combine the decades of wisdom that the old lead cows have in surviving the coming winter, right?

And those herds will always carry with them a few young bulls, spikes and rag horns. And if you're just hunting for meat, they can be a great resource. Big herds are easier to find, and they're easy to track if you have snow.

They can be hard to stock because you've got a whole bunch of

very spooky eyes looking out for each other. The old time

timeer once said to me at this point in time as one old timer once said to me

those bulls are just leaning against a tree in a quiet thicket and trying to catch their breath.

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