Kentucky elk hunting
And, with the pandemic in full swing, people with time on their hands swarmed the mountain trails with ATVs. The September heat stifled the elk movement and killed our hopes of hearing any bugling.
That flurry of action faded quickly, too. ( Don't Miss: The Country's Best Elk-Hunting Units) We saw the bull again that evening, but again, he stayed in cover without offering a shot. Eventually, the bull followed a cow over the rim of the bench below, and out of sight. With so many elk around, Potroast and Eric had no choice but to wait. The bull stopped at 40 yards, but obscured by brush, he offered no shot. Coming through the brush below was a 6圆 frame that dwarfed the 4x4 they intended to hunt. The closest was in easy bow range, but Potroast decided to wait for a bull. Knowing there was no way to get to the planned spot without busting the herd, Eric and Potroast took advantage of a good wind and slipped up to the rim just above the cows.Īs the darkness faded, they began to pick out the shapes of the cows below.
We began to hear cows mew on the bench just below our trucks. Our plan was to wait for enough light and then work our way down the two-track road on foot until we were level with him, hoping to catch him in route from the open grass mountaintop to his timber bedding area down low.īut as daylight approached, our plans changed. Opening morning, Eric, Potroast, and I parked our trucks well above the bench where the 4x4 had been the day before. The combo produced 86 pounds of kinetic energy, more than enough for elk. He had worked on his setup all summer, and he was shooting a 515-grain arrow and a fixed-blade head.
Kentucky elk hunting pro#
Knowing he had a second chance to hunt in December, Potroast chose to use his Hoyt Pro Defiant for the September season. From a high vantage point, we located the same 4x4 from our first trip and made a game plan to get on him the next morning.įor the Kentucky archery season, hunters can use either a bow or a crossbow. The day before the opener, we decided to head up the mountain for one final scouting trip. Two more subsequent scouting trips helped us dial in on plenty of elk, with a few backup spots just in case. Potroast had no plans of being picky he was just after a legal Kentucky bull. And when a 4x4 bull crossed the dirt road just 60 yards in front of us, we knew we were in the right place. As the sun rose, the valley below us was blanketed in fog so thick it looked like you could walk across it. We met Nate and Eric, and piled into Nate’s truck for our first trip to our hunting area. With a September 12 opener, we made our first scouting trip in late August. He and his guiding partner, Eric Arnold, with Hartshot Outdoors, knew the ins and outs of zone selection, and they had built years of landowner relationships and public-land knowledge for the area. After moving to Kentucky, guiding for eastern elk became a natural fit. A Colorado native, Nate had hunted and guided for western elk nearly his entire life. Luckily for us, good friend Nate Noble had been guiding elk in Eastern Kentucky for years. ( Don't Miss: North American Super Slam: 29 Big Game Animals You Need) The Kentucky herd lives on a patchwork of private and public lands, and the habitat is further divided into zoned hunting areas.
Kentucky elk hunting how to#
Our initial excitement was tempered with the realization that we had no idea how to go about elk hunting in our home state. Friends who were watching the tag drawing live on Kentucky Afield had seen Potroast’s name flash across the screen for an either-sex archery elk tag. My 15-year-old son Nathaniel (everyone calls him Potroast) and I were sorting through camping and fishing equipment for our canoe trip when our phones began to blow up. We entered the drawing last spring, same as always, but with the world gone crazy, we were packing for a summertime trip to the Minnesota Boundary Waters, and sure not thinking about elk tags.īut that changed on a fateful Saturday. Honestly, we’d been snubbed so many times that I had quit checking the results. For over 20 years I’d been unsuccessfully applying for one of the handful of tags, first solo, then together with my wife and kids. A Kentucky elk tag was the last thing on my mind in May of 2020.