Ili here with the Should We Go Outside YouTube channel. Today a professional hunter is here to help me on Arizona's hardest elk hunt. For the last three years I've been trying and failing to search out Arizona's most elusive herd of elk. Have you ever watched a toddler try and do something and it's simple but they mess it up so bad over and over that you just finally have to step in and help? Well that's JJ. Who saw some of my YouTube videos and decided he just couldn't take it anymore so he came out to help me out today. So we've got some fresh snow as of last night but it's foggy and that's going to make glassing pretty useless. We're going to drive roads, try and find as fresh as this tracks. I've actually had quite a few people in the comments tell me that one of the best bets that we probably have is to find a fresh set of tracks and hike in after them. You're talking to maybe seven miles is what you'd expect to be able to find the animals within that distance and this kind of weather if they're not pressured it's more likely on the lower end. That's what we're kind of gunning for today. If we can find tracks we can follow them. That's our best bet. So we're going to be cruising roads for a bit here bringing you to see what we can find. Well at least we'll be cruising roads for the morning until the fog clears. So we cut at least three sets of mountain lion tracks today a bunch of kayoaks and hundreds of mule deer. That's a pretty decent lion track. Alright I'm not sure how many miles we've gone today used about a quarter shank of gas. A lot of deer tracks no fresh elk sign I'll give you that. Gonna grab some lunch cook something up out here back to it maybe do some hiking up a canyon. Sonia with meat sauce. Why go through the work of packing this up doing the freeze dried meals. I don't know it's nice to have something warm out here. A lot of the time I'll just pack a sandwich but today we're treating ourselves I guess. We're finishing up lunch we're going to head back to the base of the canyon. We saw some mountain lion tracks coming out of the canyon this morning and I think there were some older elk tracks there. There were covered in snow but you looked like elk tracks. So we're going to give that a try probably hike up the canyon a bit. Had a couple of people tell me in the comments the day that I saw those rest tracks I should have followed those into the canyon. Truth was guys I had my mom coming into town to visit and I had to be back that afternoon. So I couldn't break away for the amount of time it would have taken to go really travel that distance. Today we're just going to see what we can see and then probably hike up to the ridge line and then glass from there walk back on the ridge line and then back down to the bottom. So kind of planning a loop see what we can find and we'll bring you guys along so you can see I've now spent over 30 days hunting the hardest hunt in Arizona. Today we're going to get one where we're going to hike around like usual. Bring you guys along for the ride. Why is this hunt so hard? Well first Arizona this year almost 200,000 hunters applied for an elk tag and only about 18,000 got an elk tag. I think those numbers are correct. I'll double check them and then we'll fix it on the screen if they're not. And the odd forward drawing or actually getting worse every single year this year it'll be three years since I last got a tag. So that's why I'm out here on this particular hunt. This isn't over the counter tag. You've got hunt all year long but the catch is there are only about 50 elk spread over 4.6 million acres of land. Meaning there's only about one elk for every 144 square miles of land. Very low odds. Terrible success rate. I think it's been three or four years since anyone's harvested an animal on this hunt. On average you get about 600 people in the area hunting at least previous reports about 600 people per year about 2000 on days and nobody's been successful in three or four years. So that's been me the last little while. And well if you've been following along this journey you've seen we make a couple mistakes a few mistakes not that many. A perfectly average number of mistakes. Well let me introduce you to JJ. He is a hunting guide out of New Mexico in Colorado. He's been watching the videos. He said he wanted to come out see if he could help me out. And so we've been going out today traveling up and down about 20 miles over the bridge is hiking, glassing and we're going to see if we can find these animals. I say this is a joke but I think he saw my videos and it was like watching the toddler not able to do the simplest task and he couldn't take it. So he drove about seven hours last night to come here and see if he could help me out. All right. So we're going to start hiking so if we can cut some tracks. I knew I'd been smelling something weird. Something's been eating this dead squirrel. We made it up to 10 in about a mile half maybe two miles from the tracker and no signs of alchemy for a track up here. So we're going to hike up to the ridge line so we're not backtracking over the same pass if we can look at the North facing slopes on the way out. We made it up at the top of this bench. We're smelling something but hard to say. Got another two miles along this ridge line and we'll see if we can find any sign up here. Feels alky. I'm sorry that I've put you on the back burner. Other matters if I keep my brain. I know that's not an excuse to forget about you but I guess that's just by someday. So we got up the canyon nearly two miles over the ridge and onto the bench that we wanted to check out and we spent the next two hours glassing till sunset discussing the best strategies for success here in this unit. Now here's the advice JJ gave me one is it's big country. There's so much possible space for these elk to be in and I can't use my plane to fly over and locate the animals. So using fresh snow as a way to drive ridges and cut tracks is one of our best chances at locating elk sign as they cross over a ridge oftentimes down a draw. Now number two when glassing we're actually looking for pockets of cover on North facing or shaded slopes. We're focusing about halfway up the ridges. Number three was to go out and review historic pins. Look where I found sign and come up with strategies to mark and categorize that sign to try and find patterns based on the time of year that the sign occurred. So finding fresh beds market note the time of year. That's going to help me identify where they are over time throughout the season. And so that's a long term strategy but I thought it was a great tip. Alright guys we didn't find any elk today but if you're looking for an easy hunt you've come to the wrong place. If however you want to watch me suffer and struggle eat a bunch of salad and try and figure out this impossible hunt then don't forget to like and subscribe.