Packing for Grand Junction, CO

Geordie, Re-Phil and I were fortunate enough to get drawn for cow (female) elk tags in Game Management Unit (GMU) 31 in Colorado.  We have been planning this trip for three years now.

We are flying into Denver, renting a pickup truck, and driving to Grand Junction.  Our GMU is NE of Grand Junction.  We do have a hotel reserved in GJ.  Thus, we will be driving up to our unit and back every day.  The bonus is that we will be staying in SOFT BEDS each night.

We do not have any private land secured, so we will be hunting on public land.  Our hope is that most folks are hunting for bulls or not willing to walk down the mountain to find the cows.  We do intend to spend time hiking.

Here's a map that I have loaded onto my Garmin eTrex Venture showing public (or BLM) land.


The yellow indicates public land - where we can hunt.
The white is private and we are not allowed on that land.
Grand Junction is off the map, down towards the lower left.
We figure we've got about an hour drive up and back down each day.

Elevation is about 8500 ft at the top of the range lines and down around 7300 ft in the valleys.  That's a far cry from the 677 ft of Mulberry, IN.  Will be drinking lots of water to help stave off altitude sickness.

At this point, we're pretty happy to just be going.  Getting an elk or two will just be icing on the cake.

Will try and update this blog on our adventures throughout the week if I can get a connection.
If not, will let you know what happened upon our return.

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