Hamm, good luck on what sounds like a great, and most importantly fun hunt.
I’d love to here others first elk stories.
My first elk I didn't kill.
I'd been hunting western WA since I was 14, taking 1-4 days off and staying with my grandpa in his trailer at the family elk camp. A small season compound of travel trailers and wall tents set up in a little meadow just off a FS road. It was a family full of shitty or lazy or both hunters. My grandpa being a shitty hunter, but a hard worker. The entire camp avg about 1 bull every year or so. I only got to hunt two years with my grandpa before Alztimers took him. Then I floundered for a couple years on my own. Then one of my cousins, the most consistently successful hunter in the group, sorta took me under his wing, and took me to his spots and pointed me in the right direction. One particular day, it was snowing, 6-8" on the ground, big wet flakes, not much visibility. I had labored through some 15 year old reprod with eyes on some shelterwood at the far side. When I got to the seam between the two, there was a decent little shooting lane and I decided to sit for a couple of minutes to cool down. I remember all of a sudden there was an elk face not 20 yards in front of me, poking out of the shelterwood. It looked both ways, as if crossing a busy street, then started walking out, I rememer there were antlers and they just kept coming out of the brush as he kept walking. A giant bull. I slowly raised my recently inherited 300 win mag, that I'd only shot a couple of times and hated every shot as a cruel form of punishment. I sighted on this front shoulder, closed my eyes, and jerked the trigger! WAM! Hit with an artillery punch to the shoulder that almost knocked me off my stump perch. I saw the bull lunge away in the reprod and heard him crash his way up on over a little rise and then all was silent. I was sure he was down. I mean how can you miss a 20 yard shot? I walked up there, and there was long, dark neck hair everywhere. Well at least I hit him? Then I started along the track, the snow had slowed, and I kept waiting for the spray, or at least a dribble of bright red. Alas, it never came. I followed his tracks for 30-40 min without turning up a single drop. I was dejected. I walked back to the truck. Rounded up my cousin and his hunting buddy, took them both back, they confirmed that I probably just grazed his neck, and that I needed to "stop being a p***y" and "stop f**king flinching".
All in all, it took me almost another decade to see another legal elk during season. By then I'd switched to archery and managed to tag a cow as my first ACTUAL elk. But that story is boring, and simply amounts to a blind squirrel finding a random nut.
Here is an argument for why we need those certain immigrants from the south. It’s a fine job and I would also be very proud of myself if I could ever level the ground like you did. But José and his tio can knock that out in half a day.
