Mule Deer Utah
Regarding mature bull elk in Utah, there are open elk units that you can hunt them every year, if you want to, so waiting to hunt elk isn't necessary, unless your only satisfied hunting limited entry bull elk, there is no reason to feel restricted regarding hunting mature bulls.
When I moved to Utah 41 years ago there weren't a lot of elk in South Central Utah. Mostly only on the Manti and the Fishlake and very few on the Boulder, Monroe, Beaver and Pahvant. (for me, the Nebo is not South Central
) And when I was in my 30's and 40's I hunted everything I could buy a tag for, so I hunted bother mule deer and elk, even though they could be hunted on a lot of my local units.
I found elk to be much easier to hunt, once you learned their feed/bedding routes, and those routes varied little form year to year. f they weren't in XYZ Hollow, they would be over on Quakie Ridge. Killing one was not much of a challenge. About like killing a beef, especially if the rut was on, all you had to do was drive down a mountain road and hour before dawn and listen for bulls bugling and cows/caves chirping and walk over and shoot one.
And, to me elk are about as much fun to watch as a herd of Herefords, except for the rut, if your fortunate enough to actually find two bulls fighting, which is relatively rare, in as much as I believe most of their really good quarrels are done in the middle of the night. And.....as far as I'm concerned, in most cases, all bull elk look just about alike, a huge six point is hardly more interesting to look at than a regular six point. Cookie cutter critters, IMO. Course, until I'd killed a few of them I was excited to hunt them. Elk are murder on hay stacks and 50 elk on a guys private alfalfa and it looks like the entire field is filled with unwanted wildlife.
Mule deer are my passion. Love everything about them. To me they're like a box of chocolates, you never know they are going to look like. They are independent, they are spooky, sneaky, and crafty. 14 year old young women can hunt mule deer, without a vehicle, 80 year old men can still back pack one out of the dead fall, without a horse or an ATV. They can be more prolific than elk, and you we can feed 4 to 5 deer for the same amount of feed it take to keep one elk alive. On the same acreage we can have 4 times as many deer, and four times as many hunting opportunities, as we can with elk.
Deer seem to be more acceptable to land owners than elk, but that may be only because we have very few deer, compared what ranchers used to see, when we had more.
Watch mule deer fight/rut is spectacular, as is elk but I've actually witnessed all lot more deer battles than elk battles.
Deer are more susceptible to predation and may be more venerable to disease. (Elk may be as susceptible to disease but we haven't measure it yet, as far as I know.)
I prefer deer meat flavor over elk, way more. And liver is my favorite deer meat and it is much better than nasty elk liver.
Well......you said this was just for fun.
DC
