Elk packout calculator

How much meat is in an elk?

A cow elk boned out is about 160 lb of meat (140–180 lb). A mature bull is about 250 lb with the cape and antlers (210–300 lb), a small bull about 190 lb and a calf about 75 lb. A mule deer doe is about 43 lb boned out and a mature buck about 85 lb with head and antlers. These are the brackets the calculator and the app price a packout with:

Where the numbers come from. Boned meat is a share of field-dressed weight. The University of Wyoming's elk carcass study measured boneless meat at 50% of field-dressed weight in the lab, where every scrap of lean was counted, and 43% at a commercial meat locker. Colorado's check-station weights (Hay, Hunter and Robbins, 1961) put an adult cow near 340 lb field-dressed, which works out to about 160 lb boned, the cow figure above. A 5- to 6-year-old bull field-dresses around 500 lb, roughly 215 to 250 lb of boned meat before the antlers, and a typical set of antlers weighs about 30 lb. A big bull's load can run past the expected figure, so the calculator also shows the trip count at the high end of the range. The deer rows use 48% of field-dressed weight from the matching mule deer bulletin, on the same Colorado weights.

The calculator counts boned-out meat. Packing quarters out bone-in adds weight and trips that it doesn't price.

How the calculator works

Pace. Walking speed comes from Tobler's hiking function, which slows a walker on climbs and on steep descents. With meat in a backpack the model walks at 0.6 of that pace, times 0.85, 0.92 or 1.0 for Casual, Fit or Mountain fit: on flat ground a Fit hunter carries a load at about 1.7 mph. The walk back in, with a day pack, runs at 0.7, 0.8 or 0.9 of Tobler's pace, about 2.5 mph on the flat for a Fit hunter. A game cart moves at 0.5 of it loaded and 0.9 coming back; pack animals at 0.7 loaded and 0.7 coming back, whatever the hunter's fitness.

Trips. The meat divided by what one trip carries, rounded up: the load per person times the people packing, 300 lb for a game cart, or 175 lb per pack animal.

Hours. Every loaded carry, plus a walk back in between loads. The last trip ends at the truck, so there's one walk back fewer than there are loads. Time to break the animal down and rest stops aren't counted.

Effort. An easy packout is up to 4 hours of hauling, full-day up to 9, 2-day up to 18 and 3-day up to 27. Past that, or whenever a single loaded carry runs longer than a 9-hour working day, it's an extreme packout. Days are counted at 9 hours of hauling.

What a web page can't see. The ground. The calculator treats the carry as one steady grade between the animal and the truck, over the distance you'd walk. Real routes climb and drop on the way, side-hill and cross deadfall, and every up and down costs a loaded hunter more than the net climb shows, so a real packout usually takes longer than this one. The app runs the same math on a route traced over the terrain, with the elevation read along the line.