What do you mean you don’t have time to come out and scout with me?” I asked my hunting partner who lives in the Midwest and had drawn a general-unit elk tag with me. While his whitetail scouting at home primarily revolves around an army of trail cameras, general-unit elk hunting demands more significant commitment. Elk may be patternable enough to justify the use of trail cameras, but even that requires a boots-on-the-ground, preseason scouting mission. General-unit elk require a scouting plan, a hunting plan and a camping plan, and the hunting plan, especially, requires multiple backups, as elk rarely adhere to a food-plot lifestyle once human scent begins wafting through the woods.
A lengthy explanation of this failed to persuade him, and I soon gave up the deliberation. Instead, I produced a plan to fulfill our scouting needs myself. He would potentially reap the reward of my mountain recon sweat equity, but I could also win if my arrow found its
