Read Next: On a Colorado Elk Hunt, Any Legal Bull Is a Trophy This time, he told himself, he would actually be patient. By mid-September, he was back in the same unit with his pack on. Kelsey went home and licked his wounds for a couple weeks. The big herd bull rounded up his cows and split. Unable to resist the opening-day temptation to move in on the bull he’d been chasing for so many years, he worked closer and checked the bull’s temperature with a challenge bugle, waking the bull from his midday nap. The elk wasn’t super vocal-he never was-but Kelsey was able to get eyes on the herd by midday. The bull bugled that morning and let Kelsey know where he was. On opening day, Kelsey hiked into the same heavily pressured unit in Jackson County, and headed straight to a spot where the big bull liked to hang out. So, going into the general season archery opener on August 27, 2022, he decided to take a more patient approach. He doesn’t like sitting in one place, and his tendency to move in too soon often pushed the bull (or the herd) too hard. The other mental hurdle Kelsey had to overcome was tempering his impatient nature. “You miss your family and your kids, and all that jazz.” “The mental side of solo hunting is just hard,” explains Kelsey, who was spending more and more time alone in the woods. That would give him another year to stew on the elusive bull. After screwing up setup after setup, he’d go hunt a different unit and harvest another elk, and then he’d be tagged out for the season. And while he slowly pieced together the habits and mannerisms of the heavy 7×7 that still roamed his home county forests, the bull always eluded him. It worked, and Kelsey started harvesting more elk. “That was the biggest game changer for me, because it gave me the ability to stay with the elk and live with the elk.” Kelsey with a bull he harvested in 2021 on a general season public land hunt. “Instead of going home or back to camp every night, I had camp on my back, so I could just pick up where I left off the night before,” Kelsey explains. This gave him the freedom and mobility he needed to understand elk on a deeper level. Instead of day trips into the elk woods, he committed to three- to five-day backpacking hunts-always on public land and during the general season. Roughly two years later, Kelsey changed his whole approach to elk hunting. It just took us a while to figure it out.” But we never even came close to shooting this animal. 1 Cascade Roosevelt bull, he’s made plenty of those. And in the years since he and a buddy first laid eyes on Oregon’s new No. The 35-year-old Oregon bowhunter tells Outdoor Life that he also learned most of what he knows now about elk hunting from the mistakes he’s made. It took Josh Kelsey more than two decades of hunting and a half-decade spent chasing the same bull to grasp the most important lesson of all: If you want to kill the biggest elk in the woods, you have to be the biggest elk in the woods. Josh Kelsey tagged the bull in September 2022.
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