On one of my previous trips to WY, I'd bumped into a G&F guy who had given me his card and told me to call him when I came back. Luckily, he was still around and really went above and beyond in helping me learn about the unit. One of the first pieces of advice from him was to get a GPS that had the land ownership map capabilities. While we would be hunting public ground, the elk would be on both and needing to know where we were hunting would be very important.
So, with all of our gear and my research, my buddy and I drove straight through to WY (approx 30 hrs) and arrived the next afternoon. One thing I'd sort of overlooked was actually how to enter our hunting grounds. Turns out, we were blocked by private land and locked gates and wound up spending that night in the truck. Got my contact on the phone the next morning and he told us how to get into the area. I could've avoided that fiasco rather easily but lesson learned and we had camp set up by the next afternoon.
After camp was secure we drove up into the hills to begin orienting ourselves with the planned hunting area hoping to reconcile our maps, GPS, our minds and instincts. As we looked out over the seemingly endless barren country, my buddy says excitedly.."JT! JT!...those are elk!" and there were. Lots of'em.