If you want to learn to hunt pick up a bow. It will force you to become a good hunter if you want to be successful. If you want to fill the freezer every year I'll pass to you the sage advice I was given on my first season in Idaho. "Practice and gain the skills and equipment necessary to be able to shoot from ridge to ridge" In most places here in the west that is between 400 and 1000 yards. Get a good spotting scope, spend as much as you can afford on optics especially your scope, NF, Zeiss, Leica, S&B, Swaro are my first choices. We don't shoot animals at distance if it is windy. Wind drift is a guessing game at best in the mountains, while it is fun to try to get correctly on steel We will not venture to try it on game. Use a rifle you are comfortable with, I prefer them in the .284 caliber but also use .264, .308, .338 cals from time to time. You just need to have confidence the bullet is going to go where you have it aimed every time you squeeze the trigger. Use a good bullet, what may make a good deer bullet doesn't mean it will perform on elk. When I started hunting elk from back down south, I used bullets I had killed truckloads of whitetail with. The first two elk I shot with them out of a 300wby I never found. So Accubond, Partition, ABLRs, Barnes is where I would start. Personally, ABLRs have brought the last 20+ elk home one-shot DRTs out to 630 yards.
