John and geri mcpherison"  Naked into the Wilderness book 1 has a great step by step process for butchering game. The book also have alot of other great information too. It is about 25 dollars. Money well spent.

I'm not sure where you live but contact your local rod and gun club. Around here every season they get some of the butchers from the local places to come out to the gun club and give a couple of free sessions on butchering game. The butchers usually do it as a charity type thing to increase goodwill towards the supermarkets. Anyway, a person can learn from following a book but knowing the theory and having practice are sometimes very different.

Just a suggestion.

Oh and make sure you get some good knives and put a really sharp blade on them. Even my skinning knives that are handmade damascus steel are dull as hell after a moose or deer.

I've dressed pigs for pit cooking (hawaiian style) and I've dressed plenty of foul and small game, but I've never fully butchered and packaged big game. I was at the sports store this morning asking about their book and video selection dealing with butchering. The guys behind the counter wondered why in the world I'd want to process the animal myself when I could have it professionally done. I told them I'm one of those people who like to learn how to do things the hard way. It's a shame that so many hunters know little more than how to pull the trigger. I guess the only way I'm going to learn is to do it. I'm going to start with deer and work my way up to elk.

I dunno, Butchering is one of those skills that are quite valuable, and rare. I've already decided I want to take my first large animal with my bow. And I feel an obligation to be able to fully process the animal on my own with as little waste as possible before I send any future harvests to professional meat cutters.

In the field, you'll need to clean your kill and transport it back to place where you can butcher it. At least that's how I do it. Get a Wyoming knife, a big plastic bag for the interesting organs, and always hunt uphill.

How do you plan to get an elk home? Do you have a horse, or a 4X4?

If I kill something as large as an elk I'm going to quarter it and bone it out in the field. Then I'm going to pack out each quarter. I'll hang the quarters in game bags and let the coyotes have the guts.  I do have to show evidence of sex, So I'll probably leave the genitalia attatched to one quarter, or, if I'm going for bulls, I'll have the head and rack. Either way it will be a lot of work, even after I get it out. But I think it's valuable knowledge worth working for.