Colorado’s deer and elk hotel reopens for a second weekend of business Saturday. All new guests. Same old song and dance team.
When you think about it, the hunting grounds aren’t that much different from a resort in Cancun or Cabo. Every week, regular as clockwork, one batch of tourists checks out, another moves in.
Only difference is, the Colorado Division of Wildlife generally allows a few days to change the sheets at the campgrounds instead of a couple of hours at the hotel. And, of course, the entertainers at the resort don’t keep getting bumped off one by one as the season progresses.
Actually, the analogy can be extended across the forest as a whole. In each of the four rifle segments, an entirely new regiment takes over the high country, each full of expectation and merriment as if nobody else had been there before.
Unless there’s a radical weather change, they’ll generally be chasing after the same deer and elk as the previous group.
The second-season visitors who begin searching a half-hour before sunrise Saturday will get a bit of a break.
The 35,000 hunters who participated in the elk-only first split that ended Tuesday took occupancy for just five days maximum, most considerably less, barely enough to rumple the pillows.
That’s as far as it goes with the light sleepers. Approximately 75,000 elk licenses are sold for this second split, another 35,000 for deer. By time that gang gets done beating the bushes for nine days, through Oct. 30, there will be tracks all over the sand and a hole in the volleyball net.
Guests for the third (Nov. 5-11) and fourth (Nov. 16-20) seasons are betting on a change in the weather, enough snow to flush some fresh entertainment down from higher elevation.
Which is where our second group of visitors might get lucky all over again. A wave of new snowfall is predicted across the high country beginning Friday. Coupled with the storm that hit early last week, the accumulation may be enough to prompt a substantial downslope migration, particularly among elk and larger buck deer.
At worst, a fresh snow cover falling just before opening day would serve to quiet a forest that had begun to dry out toward the end of the first split.
Those who gambled on fresh sheets and flowers in bloom during that limited-license, elk-only first season wound up with a mixed bag in the tracking department. Except for the exposed, south-facing slopes, the woods remained plenty moist for quiet stalking and soft enough to follow elk tracks.
But temperatures that fluctuated wildly between day and night played a nasty trick in those places where snow remained. The snow surface melted by day, then froze up again overnight, creating a noisy, popcorn explosion underfoot until the sun reached it at midmorning.
All these uncertainties, the elements that shift almost daily like a roll of casino dice, are what provide hunters with so much delicious anticipation, a keenness that begins with the license application process in April.
First season? Second? Third? Fourth? Every hunter has his reasons and his favorite.
Thing is, we never know whether we’ve chosen correctly until our season is done.
But the best part is that we get to guess again next year.
