We hiked far...... it was steep..... I am fat.... we looked through binos for many, many, many, hours... we saw lots of bears..... bears are heavy..... fat kids have a hard time passing up chocolate.
The end.
It has been a while back, but one afternoon of archery elk hunting turned into a turkey hunt and I put an arrow through a Merriams. As I was carrying it back to the truck, I about stepped on a rattle snake.... who also got it from the same arrow. After tending to the bird, I screwed in another...
Mine matches most of above with the addition of an 8ft plastic Costco table..... when I am lucky enough to get a big mule deer buck back to the truck whole with the sled or cart the table makes a hell of a good ramp for loading solo.... and more often it is also really handy for more detailed...
Best bang for your buck is going to be the Kilo 1600BDX. Will range reliably beyond 1000 yards under normal conditions, has the red OLED read out, and has the applied ballistics ultralight blue tooth / ap ready to go. Even if you don't have a BDX scope for the rangefinder to communicate with...
Been out once for bunnies and a couple times for coyotes..... In an area we used to be able to see dozens if not even hundreds of cottontails in the past, we saw ZERO. That said, the coyote numbers see ridiculously high this year in the Billings area.
The schnitzel suggestion is solid....one of my favorites. But I shot one last week and turned it into a chowder in the crock pot. Sweet potatoes, corn, bacon, bell peppers, carrots, green chillies etc.... even my wife and daughter singned up for seconds on that one.
I'll second the barbacoa suggestion.... I REALLY like the burritos at Cafe Rio that use pork barbacoa so I googled the recipe and got this. Have done it twice with elk neck and can tell you it is now my favorite way to eat elk.... besides maybe just a medium rare chunk of backstrap...