Trained 40 Elk Hunters - What I learned

Over the last two months I put 40 hunters through live elk training in the field. Not lectures. Real stalks, real glassing, real archery setups that run two or three hours. The same three failures showed up over and over, and every one of them traces back to the flood of content hunters are drowning in right now.

This isn't an anti-content rant. There are hundreds of skill videos on this channel and you need that baseline. The problem is what happens when guys try to apply every framework at once: analysis paralysis, decision fatigue. I break down handicapping your options instead of hunting a flowchart, why inaction is almost always the worst probability you can pick, how to actually mark an animal with OnX, landmarks, and terrain reading before you commit to a stalk, and why proximity (not calling sequences) is the dominant factor in archery elk.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:49

All right, guys, let's cut through all this bullshit YouTube, Instagram, hunting content that is arising over the last 18 months. It's not that it's wrong, but what's going on, just like AI has infiltrated every other piece of content out there, guys are taking all the old skill set videos, all the tactic videos that I've done, other people have done, they throw them into AI, it throws out scripts for them, and they make short form and long form content. All good. I don't have a problem with it, but it's doing something perverse to hunters. It's giving them analysis paralysis. Guys are looking at 30 different skill set videos, framework videos, and they're thinking they gotta apply every little detail in the field and it's making them worse hunters. I'm not saying it's not valuable, don't get me wrong. I'm like one of the OGs on this front, right? I've got hundreds of tactics and skill set videos on this channel. Go check them out. You need that baseline, but you can't get caught up in it. I know this because the other side of my world is in-person training of elk hunters or guiding elk hunters. So I see guys, I'm talking guys that have never pissed in the woods all the way to guys that have decades of elk hunting experience. You see these guys trying to find the perfect solution, getting analysis paralysis, getting decision fatigue, and not doing shit and not killing any elk. I'm sure this applies across the board to a lot of other hunting endeavors and endeavors in general. So, what I'm gonna do for you in this video is I'm gonna distill it down to three things. Three things that over the last two months, I taught over 40 hunters in person. I'm not talking about sitting in a lecture hall just doing an in-person YouTube video with guys. I'm talking about taking hunters, taking them up into the elk woods, finding elk, glassing for elk, doing real-world scenarios. We're talking about scenarios that are very realistic from the beginning of the stock to the shooting position, to taking the shot, to doing the terminal archery setup. We're talking about some scenarios that take two or three hours. And the awesome thing about it is it gives the person a feedback loop and it gives me a feedback loop. I see what guys are struggling with out in the field. And one of the biggest ones to arise in the last year, year and a half is just overwhelming focus on the perfect solution. So we've got to get through that. I'm gonna leave you with three things, three big topics that if you take them into the Elkwoods here in a month, two months, they're gonna make you a better hunter and they're gonna allow you to focus on the shit that matters. The number one mistake that I'm seeing is guys are treating hunting as solving a mathematical formula. Hunting is not like that. Hunting is all about handicapping your options, choosing the best one. Yes, that might be based on a framework, context, your experience, but you've got to choose the right one and then execute on it. It's an art form at this level, more than it is trying to solve and do the right thing according to some flow chart. As an example, let's say you're gonna start a stock. You look at the different ways you could approach this stock, and in reality, one of those routes has got a 30% chance of success, another one's got 30% chance of success, another one's got 20% chance of success, another one's got 15% chance of success, another one's got 0 to 5% chance of success. You still have to pick one. A lot of guys think, oh, none of these are gonna work out perfectly, so I'll just wait for the situation to get better. I'll just wait it out and find a better situation. You can't do that. You have to handicap the options you have and execute. Another example that happens a ton, and I see this in our scenarios, I see this in our live training. Once guys choose a direction to go and they get at that terminal archery setup, they get a bull coming in and things don't work out perfectly. A perfect example is the hung up bull, right? We're in a perfect archery setup, a bull comes up, he comes in maybe a little bit different than we thought he would. He sees the spot where that cow should be, where the collar is. He's not gonna come a foot closer. He hangs up there and he barks. So if you know a little bit about Elk Hunt, and you can go check out my archery setup video here, you know that when they bark in that situation, they either haul ass away, or you have a little probability, maybe 20 to 25% of the time, they hang up right there. They might go a little bit further from you, they might hang up, they might display a little bit, they might go to your wind, but they never get any closer. In that situation, the shooter has to stock the bull. And if the caller's in control, he's got to get that shooter to stock the bull. Now, a lot of guys look at this and it's happening in real time, either on a live bull or in one of our training scenarios, and they don't want to do anything because they look at that opportunity and they think that's a five, 10% chance, maybe. I've got to move across that open country on a bull that's alert and focused on us. So they don't do anything. They literally choose the almost 0% chance because it's the default solution, right? They can't figure out a perfect solution, so they just sit there, watch the bull, and it walks off. Why would you not choose that 10% chance, right? Get up there, know how to stock, move forward, close that last 10 yards, that last 25 yards that you have to as a shooter in that scenario, and you still got a chance. You got a five to 10% chance. I know this sounds basic to you, but you have to think about this concept. I action is a lot of times the worst probability chance you have. So you gotta understand this is a little bit of an art form. You gotta be looking at all your different choices and choose the best one on the knowledge you have. A core concept of hunting that is getting lost right now. All right, guys, and some of my content, you're gonna see that I've been using this chest holster from Invader Concepts. This is with my 10 millimeter. I also use it with my Glock 19 and even a PMR30. I'm gonna do a bunch of content here in the next couple months on that around bear defense. It should be interesting. It looks a little awkward to have your gun under your bino harness, but if you test out all the different variations, it is the best and you have it on you all the time. I do have a discount code, it's Cliff G and it's for 10% off. Go check them out. All right, so the next concept is related on stocks. It doesn't matter if it's just getting close in order to do a call-in setup for archery, or if it's an actual rifle scenario where the whole hunt is the stock, right? We're just trying to get into shooting range. Guys are skipping the biggest concept here. I've got a stock framework right here. You can go check it out. They focus on all the little nuances of that, and then they forget the most important part. There's a lot of details in there that are valuable, but you can't look beyond the most important part. You have to know where that animal is when you see it and when you stock it. Again, sounds super basic. You can do this with Onyx, you can do it with landmarks, you can do it with reading, just a traditional map. And the best is to have a combination of those, right? You can look at the way I do it on Onyx here, but the key is in order to get perfectly accurate, you've got to look at the animal, you can project the waypoint. I know a lot of you guys have got range finding binoculars that'll do the same thing, but you need to make sure it's right. And a lot of times that means you have to use your intuition, and that is getting lost a little bit. You see it there, you think it's at that point, choose a landmark, a giant snag, a rock, a unique rock that you can follow during the stock without having to get off your path, expose yourself, get into a bad wind situation or whatever to keep track of the animal. You need to be able to mark the animal and know exactly where it's at. I'm telling you again, in these classes and when I'm guiding people, it is stunning to me how people forget where the animal is or they just don't mark it right in the first place. What they do instead is they jump to the next steps. And you can't do the other steps. You can't worry about your wind, you can't worry about the noise you're gonna make, you can't worry about where the animal's going if you don't know where it is in the first place. Again, sounds like a very basic concept, but it happens in archery and rifle on real elk and training scenarios. Guys lose track of the animal. So you have to master that skill. And yes, it is a skill, but again, a little bit of an art. Use multiple tools to focus where that animal is, and then you can execute a good stock. And this kind of plays back in to the first concept that I brought up. What folks do, particularly when they learn in an area and they don't know every little knob, they don't know every little creak, they fall back to those frameworks and ideas that people have told them are certain, and they do that and they skip the fact that, hey, I've got to actually figure out where this thing is. That's the baseline idea. You've got to figure out where it is, mark it, and then execute the stock accordingly. If you're doing everything right on the wrong point, you're never gonna kill anything. And then to exacerbate this scenario is when somebody marks an animal incorrectly and they start executing what they view as the perfect stock, when they realize that they've mismarked the animal, they have no way of recovering. They they they lose all context around them and they can't back up and figure out exactly where that animal is. And this is because they're getting tunnel vision around the idea that their optic is gonna work perfect in terms of marking that spot, the compass on their phone is gonna work perfectly. You have to use the art of hunting, the art of reading terrain to make sure this is correct. And that means you have to have a little bit of an open mind. You gotta take all the inputs in to get that good starting point. There's another gigantic distortion that very few people talk about, and I'm not gonna comment on the ethics of it, the morality of it, or whatever. But in a lot of hunting films, you are seeing guys execute perfect stocks on animals. Of course, you're not gonna see when they botched the stock, so there's a little distortion there, but I can tell you where it's legal in a lot of these hunting films, guys are using radios to keep track of the animal for the guy that's stalking. In areas where it is illegal to do that, a lot of guys are using signaling to do the same thing. You don't see this in content a lot of the time because there is kind of that underpinning of an ethical dilemma. It's super efficient to signal or use radios to get on animals during stalks. I'm not saying that's not the case. What I'm saying is it distorts people's perspective of the importance of this. You've got to be able to mark animals where they actually are to get close to them, to do that archery setup, or get close to them and shoot them with your rifle. All right, the third one, and this is becoming more and more pervasive in the elk hunting world, and that is over focus on calling specific sounds, sequences, that sort of thing. The reason this has become so dominant and is like just like stressing people out, squishing their brain, making their head hurt, is that there is content that has hooks to it, like the thing that gets your attention that says, Hey, if you do this, then this, then this, you're gonna have a dead bull on the ground. If any content starts that way, particularly with calling, it is bullshit. The dominant factor in archery hunting, I can promise you that this is a fact statistically when it comes to calling an elk is proximity. The closer you get to a bull, hopefully without calling at all, or very minimally, the higher your chances of killing an elk. That fact does not depend on the calls you make, the sequence of the call, this call or that call. The least you can ask a bull to do results in the highest probability of success. That has nothing to do with 99% of the elk calling content out there. Now, I'm not saying making good sounds, making sounds that sound like elk is not a good thing. I'm saying that we are going beyond that statistical fact and we're jumping in to these very nuanced things when it comes to elk calling. You have to focus on the fact that getting close is really the dominant factor. You can extrapolate that this specific sequence seems to work on these specific elk. And now, if you do it all over the country on all different subspecies of elk, where there's a huge massive spectrum of pressure on the elk, there's a huge difference of density of bulls and cows and specific drainages, you're not going to be able to apply just an all-encompassing system to calling an elk. The only exception is if you get close. And that can be close to a stationary bull, it can be close to a herd of elk, a swirl of elk, it can be close in the sense of you have identified where the bull is, you've identified where he's going, you've gotten on that path, you've made sure your wind is good, and you're just pulling him 20 yards off the path he was already gonna go, 30 yards off the path he was gonna go, maybe 50 yards off the path he was gonna go, but not 250, not 300 yards from where the bull was already gonna go. There's way too much overanalyzing the details of calling elk, and that is a function of the content out there. Again, I'm not saying guys are wrong. I've got elk calling strategies out there. I love this calf calling strategy. I use and execute quite often. It works great when there are calves in the area and you call those calves in. But that brings me to another little chunk of this. You can be the best caller on earth, you can have the best sequences at the right time and make the right sound, and you can even have the ability to get close to elk once they vocalize or you're able to glass them up. But guess what? You can't do any of that shit if you haven't found elk in the first place. And a lot of guys, for some crazy reason, they think they can do that. All this stuff when it comes to calling, cold calling included, you have to be in the elk. So the first thing you gotta do is find sign. Go check out my video on looking at elk sign. You've gotta find sign, you've gotta find fresh sign, you've gotta find elk with your glass, and then get into the calling world, right? You can't just go out there in an elk desert with magic calls and pull them in every time. It doesn't work. All right, guys, so this covers it. These are the three big things I've seen in my courses, I've seen over years of guiding, thousands of hunters that were guided by guides that work for me. This is the stuff that people struggle with. These are three concepts that I promise you you focus on them here in a month, here in two months. Yes, all that other stuff is widely available. It is great for people, but these three big concepts are getting lost. Use them and you will be way more successful. One of my old school videos that's in this vein is this one why 5% of hunters kill 95% of the elk. Cover some other big topics that you don't hear a lot of other people talk about that will lead to success. Go check it out, guys. Thanks for watching. Subscribe. I'll catch you later.