Hunting Colorado’s Uncompahgre Plateau BIG CATS, BIG BULLS, & BIG BUCKS
By Michael Deming
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aving grown up in Colorado, I was very familiar with the quality of the plateau and the history of big bucks and bulls that have come from it over the past forty years. It is one of the most sought-after units in the state of Colorado for big bull elk as well as mule deer. One of these premium elk tags is going to require roughly two decades of accumulated preference points to get to play the game during one of the open seasons. Deer won’t take as many, but you are still going to spend at least a decade as a nonresident to get a chance to hunt. Having not been in the unit in over a decade, but knowing the history, I invested in a 2nd season deer landowner voucher and coaxed a good buddy into doing the same. I scouted heavily on this drought year and was turning up a whole lot of nothing. By the time the season arrived, I had exactly no contender bucks and by the last weekend of the season, I had only seen one giant buck. It was in the back of a truck. I felt that I was pretty good at getting things done in an unfamiliar area, and I don’t mind a piece of humble pie every now and then, but eating the whole pie wasn’t something I was used to. I started making phone calls and visiting taxidermists, meat processors, and even calling outfitters with a few days left to at least help my buddy fill his tag. The name of JT Robbins of Allout Guiding & Outfitting kept coming up as a go-to guy for someone who knows the area and consistently delivers success to his clients. However, I didn’t connect with him while we were still in the unit and I ended up eating my tag.
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February 2019 | SPORTSMAN’S NEWS
JT reached out to me soon after the hunt ended and shared some great pictures of successful clients. He said that he would be busy finishing the elk season and then would be onto cats as soon as 4th season was over and wanted to talk when he got a decent break. Since we are always looking to pair ourselves with the best outfitters in the business, I was open to the conversation whenever he was available. For the next 8 weeks, every time I had a text from JT it was another huge cat either in a tree or being held by a successful client. By the time we got to speak about working together, he had successfully harvested twenty big cats out of both Colorado and Utah. This is a level of success that I’m not familiar with and he does it nearly every single year. JT informed me that our hunt in unit 61 was very similar for those guys for deer, but the elk is where things are at. Big bulls and cats are truly his passion and after the results he had posted from the past few months, I knew that Allout Guiding & Outfitting was someone we wanted to work with in the future for our Pro Membership Sweepstakes, as well as booking those hunters who have spent decades building points. We made arrangements to tag along for a spring bear hunt in Utah as well as do a late season bull elk hunt for the next season. The spring bear for my good buddy Dave Bloom was a success and I got to see how JT and his team worked together and it made me even more excited to get to unit 61 for the fourth season elk hunt. We arrived at Gateway Canyons Resort and Spa in Gateway, Colorado to start our elk hunt in mid-November. This made for more of a luxury getaway than the base camp for an elk hunt. However,
