Opening Morning Elk Hunt Timeline: When to Leave Camp

Work back from legal shooting light to the minute you leave camp. A worked timeline for a Colorado rifle elk opener, with the numbers behind each step.

Most opening mornings are lost before sunrise. The hunter is still walking when legal light starts, arrives sweating and loud, and sits down in a spot the elk left twenty minutes earlier. The fix is arithmetic done at home: start from the minute you may legally shoot and work backwards.

Start from legal light, not from sunrise

Colorado's big game hunting hours run from one-half hour before sunrise to one-half hour after sunset. ^[1] That first half hour is when elk are most likely to still be in the open, and it is the half hour a late hunter spends walking.

Sunrise is not one time across the state. The sunrise table in the brochure is for Denver only. ^[1] The west slope runs several minutes behind the plains, and the time moves by about a minute a day through the rifle seasons.

For the second rifle opener on Saturday, October 24, 2026, legal light at the middle of three units works out like this:

By the third rifle opener on November 7, the clocks have gone back, and legal light in unit 37 starts at 6:10 a.m. and ends at 5:26 p.m. Get the times for your own unit and dates from the legal shooting hours tool.

Work backwards

Take a seat 1.4 miles from camp with 600 feet of climb, in unit 37, on October 24.

The walk is the number hunters guess wrong. Here is where the 1 hour 40 minutes comes from.

How long the walk takes

In the one study that tracked elk hunters by GPS at 15-second intervals, hunters on foot averaged 40 meters a minute over the day, about 1.5 miles an hour, with an average climb of about 1,000 feet between the low and high point of a hunt. ^[2] That is a daylight figure and it includes stops to look and listen.

For a walk in the dark with a pack, a careful planning figure is:

• 1.5 miles an hour on a trail or old road.
• Add an hour for every 2,000 feet of climb. This is the long-standing hillwalker's rule for uphill time.
• Add a third again if the route leaves the trail. Deadfall, creek crossings and route-finding by headlamp cost more than they do at noon.

For 1.4 miles and 600 feet off trail: 56 minutes for the distance, 18 for the climb, and a third on top comes to about 1 hour 40 minutes. On a trail the same walk would be about 1 hour 15.

These are allowances, not measurements of you. Walk the first half mile of the route in daylight the day before and time it. Then trust your own number over anyone's rule.

The same sum for the evening

Legal light ends half an hour after sunset. In unit 37 on October 24 that is 6:42 p.m. Three things follow:

• Know the time before you sit down. The last legal minute comes while there is still light to see by, and it is easy to run past it.
• A shot at 6:30 p.m. means work in the dark. Field dressing and the first load out happen by headlamp. The pack-out calculator tells you how many hours that seat costs.
• Walk out the way you know. The route you timed in the morning is the route to use at night.

What breaks the timeline

• One alarm for the whole camp. The hunter with the longest walk sets the alarm. Everyone else can sleep later only if they leave separately.
• A different seat for the wind. If the morning wind is wrong for the seat you planned, the backup seat has a different walk and a different leave time. Work out both at home.
• Other hunters. GPS studies find most hunters within a few hundred yards of a road, and many walking the closed roads. ^[2] If your route follows a road, expect headlamps, and expect elk near it to have moved before legal light. See how far hunters really walk.
• Snow. Fresh snow slows every part of the walk and shows your tracks to the next hunter. Add the margin again.

What this does not tell you

• It does not tell you where elk will be at first light. It gets you seated on time in the place you chose.
• The GPS pace is from one walk-in area in western Montana in the 1990s, with volunteer hunters. ^[2] It is a starting figure for the sum, not a prediction.
• Legal light here is worked out for the middle of each unit, to within about a minute. Check it against the brochure and your own position.

FilledTag does this arithmetic for every seat in a plan: the exact minute to leave camp for each one, each day of your hunt, with the walk already measured. Custom plans are available at https://www.filledtag.com/plans.html.

Sources

1. Colorado Parks and Wildlife, 2026 Colorado Big Game Hunting brochure, legal hunting hours and the sunrise and sunset table (page 13). https://cpw.state.co.us/big-game-brochure
2. Lyon, L.J. and Burcham, M.G. (1998). Tracking elk hunters with the Global Positioning System. USDA Forest Service Research Paper RMRS-RP-3. https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs/rmrs_rp003.pdf