CO has far more elk than the advertised number, which is consistently reduced to keep the public land welfare ranchers from complaining even more than they already do about the wildlife eating “their” forage. The bull:cow ratio is misleading because they count any branch-antlered bull as mature, which they definitely are not insofar as in a healthy balanced herd even 5×5 bulls rarely get to breed and the raghorns don’t have a chance. So biologically the mature bulls (5×5 and up) are less than half what they advertised. But then the average hunter is happy to bag any legal bull, so the deceit isn’t that harmful to hunters, but it’s very harmful when management claims they have achieved sufficient mature bull/cow ratios when they’re not even close and manage, or mismanage, accordingly . In that case it’s a damn lie.
The bottom line is that CO has more elk than any other state or province, and some really good ones if you can get away from roads and ATV trails, far away. The machines and technology are killing elk hunting here.
