The Elk Glade Journal.

elkglade.com moved to Cloudflare Workers this spring. Here's what changed, what didn't, and what's coming next.

Lauren · 2 min read

Geology, water, cover, and light hunting pressure. The south slope of Pikes Peak is not an accident — it's a place the herd has chosen for reasons you can see in the dirt.

Andre · 5 min read

Every September it comes the same way — one bull, before light, from the head of the second meadow. Here's what the first bugle of the year tells us.

Andre · 3 min read

The list, with reasons. The brochure version on most outfitter sites lists what you need; this is what we've seen guys show up without and regret. Andre walks the gear shelf piece by piece.

Andre · 7 min read

The elk herd and the cow herd eat the same forage, water the same creek, and want the same south-facing slopes. Managing both on one ranch is the whole job.

Jim Johnson · 3 min read

Front passing, the hour after a thunderstorm, snow on the high meadows. What the wind and sky are telling you when you're stalking the East Beaver bench. Five seasons of wrangler-guide observations.

Elk Glade Editorial · 6 min read

For eleven months a mature mule deer is a ghost. Then November comes and the rut hands you the one chance the rest of the year denies.

Elk Glade Editorial · 3 min read

Five a.m. coffee. Hunter breakfast before light. The mid-morning quiet. Lunch on the porch. The chuckwagon at sundown. A real day at a 138-year working ranch from the kitchen end.

Lauren · 6 min read

Whether elk tastes 'gamey' has almost nothing to do with the elk and almost everything to do with the first hour after the shot.

Lauren · 3 min read

Both involve horses, both involve Colorado, both involve cowboy hats — but they're not the same thing. Jamie on which guests go where, and why we're not trying to be both.

Jim Johnson · 6 min read

Most of a successful elk hunt happens before the season — in the quiet weeks of late summer, reading what the country is already telling you.

Andre · 3 min read

The CPW elk draw deadline, the preference point math, the OTC vs. draw decision, and the landowner voucher window. Pre-application notes from a guide on the south slope of Pikes Peak.

Andre · 7 min read

Bulls get the photos. But ask anyone who hunts to eat which animal they'd rather have on the grill, and the answer is usually a cow.

Jim Johnson · 3 min read

There's a pool above the cattleguard where, most summers, a kid catches their first fish. It's the same pool, a different kid, every year.

Lauren · 3 min read

Four warm, dead days and a tag in your pocket. Then the line on the forecast turns blue, and the whole mountain changes its mind.

Andre · 3 min read

The shot is the easy part. The moment a bull hits the ground, the real work — and the race against the heat — begins.

Jim Johnson · 3 min read

Every spring the gobbles come back to the same ponderosa benches. The white-tipped mountain turkey is a creature of the high country, and it knows where it belongs.

Elk Glade Editorial · 3 min read

He ran marathons. He'd trained for months. And on the first morning at ten thousand feet, the mountain sat him down on a log and took his breath anyway.

Andre · 3 min read

Everything was perfect — the bull, the light, the setup. Then a thread of breeze touched the back of my neck, and the canyon went silent.

Andre · 3 min read

People ask why a working cattle ranch bothers with guests at all. The honest answer is part arithmetic and part something harder to put a number on.

Jim Johnson · 3 min read

All day the trout had been down deep, sulking. Then the light went long and gold, the first mayfly lifted off the riffle, and the whole creek tipped its hand.

Lauren · 3 min read

It comes out of the dark before you can see the bird, before you can see your own hand — one ringing gobble off the roost, and the whole mountain wakes up.

Andre · 3 min read

A whitetail runs. A mule deer does something stranger and better — it gathers all four legs and pogos straight up the rimrock like the slope owes it nothing.

Elk Glade Editorial · 3 min read

There is a sound that comes off the dark mountain in late September that you feel in your sternum before you understand it with your ears. It is the whole reason some of us live here.

Andre · 3 min read

There's a meal that happens the night a hunter's elk comes off the mountain — a few inches of backstrap, a hot pan, and a quiet that no restaurant has ever managed.

Lauren · 3 min read

For one week every fall the whole mountain seems to happen at once — the gold comes on, the bulls go off, and the cattle come down. If there's a best week to be here, it's that one.

Jim Johnson · 3 min read