Mike writes, "Here are two pics. of my brothers bull elk that he got in the 3rd Colorado rifle season. Ryan hunted alone and in some extremely steep terrain not far from a busy county road. He was successful because it was too steep and tough for most people to hike and no roads or trails went into the area keeping ATVs out.

He started out by moving down along the local river in that area until he had gotten to a spot where he wanted to start climbing up into the steeper terrain. After about an hour of climbing up through the pinyons and juniper trees in and out of the small sage flats and gulleys, he decided to level out and follow a particalur contour line along the slope. After pushing a few dark timber gulleys as he went, he come upon a gulley that was a bit bigger than the rest. As he moved to the edge to look down into it, an animal could be heard crashing through the trees below and by the sound, was most likely a large elk and was moving farther away towards the more open southern facing slope. So, he moved a little further along his contour line to where he could see the opposite southern face fairly well. He caught some movement on that slope through a small window in the trees. Looking through the scope he saw a decent bull elk that was either a 6x6 or 5x5. The bull had stopped right at that moment with a clear shot. After the report of the rifle the bull dropped instantly and never moved again.

When he got up to the bull he found that it was very nice 6x5 and that was because the bull had broken off one of it's brow tines.

To get the bull out, he first had to debone all of the meat and pack it down the slope to the river. Here his waders were hidden so that he could wade the meat across the river instead of going all the way back to the bridge where he had packed in from that morning."