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Show ELK Originally "Wapiti" Among the large game animals which inhabit Garfield County is the handsome elk. Elk herds are located in areas A and B, on the south slopes of the Beaver Mountain in the northwest corner of the county, in the Mt. Dutton area north of Utah Highway 12, and in the Boulder Mountain area. The herd on Mt. Dutton numbers over 400 animals and elk can often be seen from the dirt road that leads north to Tom Best Spring starting at the top of Red Canyon on Utah Highway 12. There are between 200 and 300 animals on Boulder Mountain. Elk were reintroduced into Garfield County in the middle 1930's and herds have grown steadily in numbers since. Each year the state allows a few animals to be hunted on a restricted hunt Last year a Henrieville hunter bagged a seven-point elk weighing between eight and nine hundred pounds in the Jones Corral area of Mt. Dutton. Success on the elk hunt in Garfield County last year ran about 60 percent successful, suc-cessful, with the season usually set for about the last week of September and the first week of October each year. The herds are beginning to spread with a few seen in the Tropic Reservoir area and in the Panguitch Lake area. Originally called "wapiti" by the Shawnee Indians, colonists nevertheless chose to call the mangificent animals "elk." In Europe, elk are actually closer to the equivalent of the moose, but the name has clung and they are commonly called elk today. A close relative of the red deer of Europe and Asia, the American elk was once found over most of the United States and southern Canada. But hunters and disease killed so many of them that they survived only in the region west of the Rocky Mountains, where the largest herds lived in Yellowstone National Park, on Montana's Sun River, and in Washington's Olympic Mountains. The bull elk stands about S feet high at the shoulder and may weigh from 700 to 1,000 pounds with rounded antlers that can spread as much as five feet. The cow elk is smaller than the male and has no antlers. Elk feed primarly on grasses but also eat twigs and needles of trees. Wolves and cougars are their natural enemy. Elk calves are born in the spring and it is rare for a cow to bear more than one. An elk calf is light tawny-brown tawny-brown with many white spots that are lost at the first change of coat in August. , ? |
