Hunting and Fishing News & Blog Articles

For many of us, it is extremely hard to get the time to get boots on the ground to scout areas for elk.  This is especially true for all of you nonresidents out there. In addition, spending two or three days of our precious days is a waste of precious time. Time you could use to be actually hunting.

E-Scouting May Be Your Answer. 

E-Scouting is a way to scout from the comfort of your home well ahead of the start of the hunting season. That way, when the season finally begins you’re prepared to get out and hunt much quicker. With the help of Google Earth’s free technology and a few other e-resources, you can now scout for elk from your computer. Other information could come in handy like harvest reports, fire history, and rainfall statistics.  However, for now, we are going to focus on finding likely honey hole by using Google Earth to e-scouting for elk in Wyoming.

Google Earth For Your E-scouting Needs When Hunting Elk In Wyoming

Google Earth is a popular and free program that every hunter should be using. Google Earth allows you to explore any area in Wyoming, or anywhere else, in 3D using satellite imagery. With this program, you can start looking for and identifying the best elk spots.  There are many tools that come bundled in the software that will be helpful for locating and marking watering, bedding, and feeding areas used by elk. You will then be able to upload or copy the GPS coordinates for the areas you found on Google Earth to a hand-held GPS unit.  If you are not a GPS person, you can print maps.

Marking your locations is fairly simple.  To add a mark you need to click “Add Placemark” and move the waypoint to that spot on the map. You will need to change the name of the mark to something that is clear and makes it easy to know what the mark points to. Examples of names are “Water”, “Food”, and “Cover”.  Giving the marks numbers after the name is optional but it helps to make the waypoints easier to read.Another helpful hint is to lay out your expected route to an area and save it on Google Earth.  You will be able to upload this to your GPS also and it will be really helpful getting to your spot in the dark.

How To Add A Placemark On A Water Hole

Opening a Placemark

Every hunter is looking for the secret sauce that allows someone to draw as many tags as possible on a regular basis. The problem with secret sauces is that they usually don’t actually exist. Grill masters recipes vary slightly but the winners in pit challenges are the cooks who can appeal to the widest number of contest judges. Regardless of this simple fact the secrets are chased and held tighter to the chest every year looking for an edge over the competition.

Byron Oldham allegedly found a secret sauce to acquiring tags across the West for himself and possibly others. Based on charges filed in Wyoming his recipe for success involved hacking the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s third party application system. He used a script that allowed him to apply for two moose tags in 2016 when only one application per person is allowed.

Upon further investigation by officials in Wyoming there was even more tampering with the system involving 99 sheep applications in one minute. The result of this investigation could lead to three years of jail time.

In our hunting world the perceived secret sauce is figuring out how to draw as many hard to draw tags as possible. The reality is that there isn’t a secret sauce for tag applications and good old fashioned application strategy and point building is the only guarantee.  The question that still needs to be answered is how many states has he been able to apply some sort of script to and acquire hard to draw tags? Did his tag application service do this for others? If someone used the Pointhunter app was their personal data compromised in some way?

All of the “secret sauce” recipes will be laid out for the public to see soon enough.

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Every now and then a new cartridge comes along that turns my head and gets me itching to shoot it. There is no secret, I’ve never been a .243 Winchester fan, always preferring the much hotter 6mm Remington. However, with the virtual obsolescence of the 6mm Remmington in both firearms and factory ammo I was stoked to try the new 6mm Creedmoor with its Hornady Precision Hunter loads. Falling neatly between the above mentioned rounds in performance and ballistics put this new chambering on deck for both my Wyoming pronghorn and whitetail hunts.

But first, a bit of range time… I was not disappointed and found the 6 Creed to be equally effective at both short and long distances. In fact, fun is the exact word that comes to mind and I burned up the better part of a case of Hornady Precision Hunter just smacking steel with it. Extremely mild mannered yet carrying enough oomph out to around 500 yards to get the job done on medium game such as pronghorns. I was growing very impatient waiting for my chance to litmus test this new cartridge in the field.

Long story short, the 6mm Creedmoor and I were able to collect two wonderful animals; my best pronghorn to date and a great 5×5 whitetail. Coupled with the 103 grain ELD-X in Hornady’s Precision Hunter the middle six emphatically let the air out of both animals. Because of the light recoil of the round I was able to watch both bullet impacts through the scope and can say that each displayed the impressive energy transfer I expected.

The pronghorn was hit slightly quartering away at a hair over 200 yards and the bullet entered mid-chest angling into the muscles forward of the off shoulder where it came to rest having imparted all of its 1651 ft. lbs of KE into the buck. He snow plowed forward on his nose for about twenty yards and toppled over, stone dead.

The elk herd in Wyoming has fared very well these past few years. The 2016 surveys have put most of the elk herds in the limited quota areas in the state well above objective levels with drastically rising bull to cow ratios, all good news for hunters. With the heavy snows of last year and a wet summer the feed on the winter range should be in top shape right now. So far, a mild winter has put our elk in even better condition for this coming fall.

Dave and I have built some fairly extensive mathematical modeling that will actually rate an area with a numeric rating from zero to one hundred based on the area’s merits from a trophy hunting perspective. Criteria and variables such as public land percentage, access, terrain, trophy quality, favorable season dates, hunting pressure and opportunity, to list just a few, are all considered. The trophy and population trend for the state is also factored in then the result is normalized to compare to other states such as Arizona, Nevada and Montana. I used this modeling equation along with some good old-fashioned intuition from living here for the better part of my 46 years to build this year’s top five area list for Wyoming elk.

This type of information for every elk area in the entire state and West can be found in the MRS section in the back of each issue of Eastmans’ Hunting and Bowhunting Journals. To get you started here are few of the better elk areas in Wyoming.

          TOTAL SCORE: 90.5/100