Whole Elk?

[runningboard]

my wife shot her 1st on a friends ranch & let us drive our old flatbed right to it & pick it up with the boom/winch

[Crunchy]

Ive gotten a few deer out whole, but never an elk.  Hard enough getting an elk out in quarters.

[Tjv28]

Don’t bother. You need to cut them up at some point anyway. Also, you have to dump everything you don’t eat; hide, legs, head, carcass

[conwaydave]

Something that always concerns me when I see a whole elk in a truck or hanging in a camp, is that I was always taught and told by butchers, is that you should get an elk hide off as soon as you can so the meat can cool, with a deer, not as much of a rush,  the elk hide is much thicker than a deer. All the elk we kill in our camp, we skin the elk right away. We are never next to a road and have to use a kart to get the elk out anyway. So to your question, even if I could drive right up to my elk and load it up, I think I would still skin it right away and remove wind pipe. (I never removed wind pipe before, until a couple years ago, the butcher guy said dude, you should remove wind pipe, it retains a lot of heat!)

[issaquarcher]

I'm with Tjv28. Why take an elk out whole at all? We've learned our lessons over the years. We've pulled elk out with carts, poles, bikes. motorcycles, three wheelers, block and tackle to truck, and even a D6 Cat. Nothing is quicker and easier than a gutless field dress on the ground done in 30-45 minutes with 4 guys. We pack no bones out.

[The scout]

  even with deer. cracks me up when I here people tell me how far they had to drag there deer. I bone out pretty much all the time right where it dies

[ghosthunter]

We have a large camp and some old guys who have been around about 70 years.
We have gotten a half dozen elk and a dozen deer all out whole.

We use to use a truck bed untiliy trailer, we would lay a ladder up to the tailgate and use a come along to pull it up the ladder, skinning as it went. Pulling it onto a clean tarp ready for the butcher.

We also used a ladder between two trucks ,skinning on the ladder than into a truck.

Now we have a drop ramp trailer. We have got them out on game carts and wagons.
Atv and trucks up old skid roads.

We carry come along ,block and tackle as standard equipment.