BENEZETTE, Pa. — Some 120 yards through light brush, just minutes into the start of the hunting season, stood some 700 pounds of mountain-raised muscle. Five feet at the shoulder, the 4 to 5 year old bull elk raised his massive head, throwing back 350 inches of antler.

Standing motionless beside his hunting guide, Mike Chippie of Windbur, Pa., held his 7mm-08 Remington at port arms. Watching. Waiting.

The bull approached at an angle and stopped 75 open yards from the hunter. Chippie never shouldered his gun. The elk cocked his head and trotted away, glancing back once as he ducked over a ravine.

“I could have taken him, but I just wanted to hold out for a unique an­i­mal,” Chip­pie said. “I have pic­tures of a bet­ter bull, and I’d seen it in there when we were scout­ing. I wanted to wait.”

John Hayes

Elk hunt to be expanded in 2019-20

Elk County Out­fit­ters guide Carey Boll­man con­curred with Chip­pie’s de­ci­sion.

“That bull was cu­ri­ous. He wasn’t sure about us, that’s why he started walk­ing up to us. He might have winded us or seen us mov­ing a lit­tle bit.”

Boll­man said three or four bulls in the 400-inch range were in the area, but he was try­ing to put his cli­ent on one par­tic­u­lar an­i­mal.

“This one to­day, it was a Fri­day or Satur­day bull,” he said. “I wouldn’t rec­om­mend tak­ing him un­til near the end of the week if we ha­ven’t found a bet­ter one. The one we’re look­ing for is a ma­ture 10- or 11-year-old bull with a rack at least 415 inches and it’s wear­ing a ra­dio col­lar.”

In terms of bi­ol­ogy, strat­egy, tac­tics and man­age­ment, Penn­syl­va­nia elk hunt­ing is un­like any other hunt in the state. For many of those lucky enough to get a tag, it is con­sid­ered the thrill of a life­time.

Elk-watch­ing tour­ists who’ve seen ha­bit­u­ated elk lum­ber­ing through back­yards in the no-hunt zone sur­round­ing Bene­zette might think elk hunt­ing is as chal­leng­ing as shoot­ing dairy cows.

But in a dozen small, rug­ged and tightly man­aged elk hunt­ing zones in north-cen­tral Penn­syl­va­nia, wild elk are sharp sighted, scent sen­si­tive and quick to spook at the hunter’s slight­est mis­take.

“I’m a big ar­chery hunter. For me, all of my deer hunt­ing is done from a tree stand. Here for these elk, it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent kind of hunt­ing.”

The last na­tive Penn­syl­va­nia elk is be­lieved to have been killed by a hunter in the 1860s. From 1913-26, the state Game Com­mis­sion im­ported 177 elk from Yel­low­stone Na­tional Park in Wy­o­ming and a pri­vate pre­serve in Penn­syl­va­nia, and stocked them in the heart of their for­mer range.

“But it didn’t take,” said Jer­emy Ban­field, a Game Com­mis­sion wild­life bi­ol­o­gist who man­ages the state’s elk. “There were hab­i­tat prob­lems to be­gin with, and once they be­gan re­pro­duc­ing they were over-hunted again.”

Hunt­ing was banned in 1934, but poach­ing oc­curred to pre­vent ag­ri­cul­tural losses and for de­cades state wild­life man­ag­ers showed lit­tle in­ter­est in elk. A 1971 sur­vey counted 65.

In 1998, how­ever, the Game Com­mis­sion and co­op­er­a­tive agen­cies and non­profit con­ser­va­tion groups tried again. This time, a trap-and-trans­fer pro­gram was aug­mented with pub­lic-pri­vate co­op­er­a­tive fund­ing of large-scale hab­i­tat im­prove­ments, ag­ri­cul­tural pro­grams to mit­i­gate losses, ed­u­ca­tion of the re­gional pub­lic and smarter man­age­ment prac­tices. The multi-fac­eted pro­gram ex­panded the elk’s range to more than 850 square miles in seven coun­ties, in­clud­ing pub­lic game and for­est lands that pro­vided sus­tain­able hab­i­tat. With the pop­u­la­tion ex­pand­ing, in 2001 the state put on the breaks with a lim­ited lot­tery-based con­ser­va­tion hunt.

“At first it was hard to get the lo­cals on board with the elk,” said Brad Clin­ton, ex­ec­u­tive pro­ducer of TomBob Out­doors’ na­tion­ally aired TV show “Friends in Wild Places.” “I’m from around here and we’ve al­ways had elk. We took it for granted, I guess. But in the last 10 years, ev­ery­body has come to the plate to help out. It’s not just peo­ple who love elk — it’s tur­key hunt­ers, deer hunt­ers, grouse hunt­ers, wild­life watch­ers, ev­ery­body who’s try­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on this new source of rev­e­nue in the area.”

To­day, more than 950 nat­u­rally re­pro­duc­ing elk are con­trolled in num­bers and range through the stra­te­gic plant­ing of wild­life food plots and lim­ited hunts.

In the 2014 li­cense lot­tery, 108 tags were is­sued. This year, a record 27,592 hunt­ers ap­plied for tags and 116 were awarded — 21 for bulls, and a record high of 95 for cows.

Chris Rosen­berry, head of the Game Com­mis­sion’s deer and elk team, said the in­creased cow al­lot­ments in the range’s west­ern zones, new food plots planted in the east and a new elk hunt­ing zone to the east in Clin­ton County, are parts of a con­trol strat­egy de­signed to en­cour­age Penn­syl­va­nia elk to move away from hu­man pop­u­la­tion cen­ters near DuBois, Clearfield County, east­ward to­ward mas­sive acre­ages of pub­lic land in Tioga and Ly­com­ing coun­ties.

“There’s no spe­cific pop­u­la­tion goal num­ber,” said Rosen­berry, while pro­cess­ing hunter-killed elk at a weigh sta­tion on the elk hunt’s sunny open­ing day. “If they go north and east, that’s great — we can ex­pand their num­bers in that di­rec­tion. If they move south and west, that’s a no. It var­ies by what we’re try­ing to ac­com­plish in each zone. There are cer­tain sub­pop­u­la­tions … where we’re try­ing to put the pres­sure on them and re­duce their num­bers.”

Ag­ri­cul­tural losses, once a big prob­lem, are less det­ri­men­tal to­day than a ris­ing elk-ve­hi­cle col­li­sion rate. Cen­tered mostly in the elk’s west­ern range, col­li­sions are in­creas­ing: eight in 2009, 44 from 2010-12, 20 from 2013-14. More tragic than the loss of the elk, hu­man fa­tal­i­ties have re­sulted from col­li­sions with the an­i­mals. Cow can weigh 600-800 pounds; bulls can reach 1,000 pounds.

The goal of mov­ing the herd is valid, said Elk County Out­fit­ters owner Jack Manack, and the agency’s method is likely to work.

“The cows tend to stay put, but the bulls, es­pe­cially dur­ing the rut, can move 20 miles or more,” he said.”That area in the north­east, it’s go­ing to open up. There’s been some good hab­i­tat work there and some elk are start­ing to show up. The cows are still not get­ting out to those out­skirts, but the bulls are al­ways head in new ar­eas.”

Manack said the cur­rent bull tag al­lot­ment is, “re­ally good.” But chron­i­cally stiff com­pe­ti­tion among guide ser­vices could lead to prob­lems dur­ing cow hunts.

“Elk are a herd an­i­mal. After the rut the bulls gather into bach­e­lor groups and the cows get to­gether,” he said. “So you’ll lump some 90 hunt­ers with cow tags into a few ar­eas. More hunt­ers in­ter­act­ing with each other could lead to prob­lems.”

Manack said he would like to see the sea­sons split into sep­a­rate bull and cow hunts. This year, he had 19 cli­ents. Among them, 18-year-old Melissa Zeger of Fort Lou­don, Frank­lin County, hunt­ing with a .300 Win­chester mag, her father and her first cow tag.

“We saw seven or eight bulls this morn­ing, and later four cows and one bull,” she said, “but the cow was 470 yards out and we wanted a 200-yard shot.”

No tree stands, no drives, no pre­dawn wait­ing. Elk hunt­ing is a run-and-gun op­er­a­tion in which guides scout the food plots nightly to learn which in­di­vid­ual an­i­mals are nearby.

“If we got our peo­ple out there be­fore dark, we’d spook [the elk],” Manack said. “At shoot­ing time, we walk in. We know they’re there. We stalk them, walk­ing up slowly. They’re not as spooky as deer, so you can get closer. But if they wind you, they hear you, they see you, they’re outta there.”

Elk coun­try is rug­ged. Much is for­merly clear cut and strip mined with steep ra­vines and thick brush in the bot­toms. Nights are spent at his fam­ily’s cab­ins and a few rent­als. At dusk and dawn, Manack whisks cli­ents over dirt roads and two-lane high­ways from food plot to food plot. From about 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., it’s down time with lunch at a road­side stop and lots of gab­bing with other hunt­ers.

By Thurs­day, 14 of his 19 cli­ents had their tro­phies. The oth­ers had passed on smaller elk and were ex­pected to score by sea­son’s end.

Zeger found a com­fort­able 209-yard shot and took her cow. Chip­pie never found his 415-inch mon­ster, but on Thurs­day put three shots into a bull car­ry­ing 350-360 inches of ant­ler.

“It was ex­actly what I wanted — a nice long hunt,” he said. “I thought it would be quite a bit eas­ier. They’re not the Bene­zette bulls you see. They play the wind more than deer and use the steep ter­rain to their ad­van­tage. But I’m ex­hausted. It was a qual­ity hunt, the clos­est I’ll ever get to a $10,000 Col­o­rado guide trip.”

Con­tact Elk County Out­fit­ters at 724-217-8502, www.ex­pe­ri­en­ceelk­coun­try.com.

First Published: November 8, 2015, 5:00 a.m.