Grew up in Colorado many years ago and hunted the Colorado mountains when it was wide open and mostly unrestricted....we had a favorite way of elk hunting on opening day..and normally got an elk or two with our group of 4 or 5 friends..we hunted the high country north of Steamboat Springs almost to the Wyoming border...we'd go in a couple of days early and set up and go to a particular "saddle" above timberline..then move down the trail that wound it's way down through the trees and in to the lower country. It was a very difficult place to get to and to get set up in so we we usually pretty much alone.
Opening day would come and early in the morning you could hear the muffled shots way down in the tree areas..we'd be sort of spread along the trail...sitting perfectly still leaning up against a tree or in a thicket of growth...after a while you could hear the noises of the elk moving up the hill away from the hunters down below...by the time they got up that high they had slowed down and just sort of wandered along...headed for that saddle to the other side of the mountain...we'd keep a sharp eye and usually a cow or young spike would show...then more and more....but the big bulls would be shadowing the herd out to the sides and being very stealthy....we often had one or more of the guys with a cow permit and it was awfully tempting to just take a cow and get it over with but we had a way of hunting that didn't take the first thing to come along.
When we were sort of among the animals as they moved along if anyone had a line on a bull he'd take the first shot and hopefully fill his tag...that would spook the herd and we could normally count on someone with a cow tag getting one or maybe a young bull.....it worked that way for many years.....then we would move out of that area as the one "migration" over that saddle seemed to be an opening day occurrance only....Damn I miss those days...and the freedoms of being able to hunt some spectacular country with out some government agency or "private" club hunters over running everything.
We loved to hunt deer the same way but with a bit less "stealth" and much lower...nothing like sitting quietly in a patch of quakies and hearing the deer move up ahead of the hunters pushing them from below..however the only time I ever had someone take a "sound shot" at me was when I was in the aspens and moving to a place to hunker down and 2 shots went crashing through the limbs above my head from below...I spent the next 10 minutes or so laying flat...pretty soon here came the 'hunters" and when I stood up it really scared the hell out of them.....after we finished the discussion I doubt they ever took another "sound shot"..one guy was actually crying...out of staters on their first hunt in that area. Not sure who was more scared but I do know they read it right that I was really angry and in those years probably a pretty imposing figure...