I first heard about the frontal shot on an elk from a friend and watched a few clips on YouTube to try and learn more about it. My interest was peaked, but the shot still seemed risky to me. Shooting right at the chest of an elk doesn’t seem to leave much margin for error. Not to mention, in my dozen years of guiding elk hunters, I’d never seen anyone attempt it.
Then, in 2020, I went elk hunting with Jason Phelps. While backpack hunting in Colorado, we started talking about frontal shots. Jason had a lot of experience with them, and his outcomes were all positive. His confidence in the frontal shot rubbed off on me to the point that I felt I would give it a chance if the perfect opportunity presented itself.
Three days later, I shot a bull head-on at less than twenty yards. The arrow disappeared inside the bull, he ran 75 yards, and tipped over. (You can watch that hunt here.) Just like that, I was a believer.
Although the shot had worked perfectly for me, I wanted to know more. What exactly was I shooting at when I took the frontal shot? How was my broadhead interacting with the vitals? I decided to pick the brains of Jason Phelps again, as well as Dr. Joe Freeman, a veterinarian of 14 years who has spent his life studying animal anatomy and is an avid elk hunter, to understand the science and rules behind this devastatingly effective tactic.
The Origins of the Frontal Shot
For Jason Phelps, mastering the frontal shot was born out of pure necessity. Phelps hunts in thick coastal timber where visibility is extremely limited.
“The majority of the elk I was calling in were coming in straight on, without ever presenting a broadside or quartering-away shot,” he said. By the time a bull would stop to figure out where the calling was coming from, the gig was up, and Phelps was rarely presented with another shot angle as the elk whirled and left.
“I kind of decided that I had to be able to make that shot if I wanted to be successful,” he explained. In 2003, while calling for a buddy, Phelps had a bull came straight in to him instead and stopped at eight yards. Phelps drew his bow, aimed for the spot above the heart where the lungs connect, and released. The bull tipped over dead after just four lunging steps. “It worked better than any broadside shot I’ve ever had,” Phelps recalled.
The Anatomy of the Target
The frontal shot is not as scary as you might think. When an elk is standing perfectly broadside, you have a massive vital target of about 16 by 16 inches. The target for the frontal shot is much smaller, roughly the size of a football standing on its end.
Dr. Joe Freeman breaks down this target window anatomically. The “football” you are aiming for is the thoracic inlet, an opening in the skeleton that leads directly into the chest cavity. “You’ve got a nice opening with nothing; no bone in the way if you hit the target,” Dr. Freeman explained. This vital window on a mature bull elk gives you close to 12 inches of target from top to bottom and about six inches left to right.
What makes this shot so incredibly lethal is the sheer volume of vascularity located right inside that window. When an arrow enters the thoracic inlet, it is entering an arterial superhighway.
“Within that opening, you’ve got the carotid arteries, the jugular veins, and once you get inside the thoracic inlet, if they’re facing you head-on and your arrow or bullet continues on, it’s going to take out the heart, the base of the heart, and may clip a lung depending upon the angle,” Dr. Freeman said. A heavy arrow that penetrates deeply will also continue through the liver and into the rumen.
Because the frontal shot targets the jugular veins, carotid arteries, and the aorta at the top of the heart, it results in massive, instantaneous blood loss. Dr. Freeman actually believes the frontal shot can be more devastating than a perfect broadside shot. He noted that you can poke a hole through the peripheral edge of an animal’s lung on a broadside shot, and the animal might survive for a long time if a major vessel isn’t cut. But the frontal shot severs the main arterial connections.
“I think you will bleed ’em out quicker most of the time,” Dr. Freeman said. Phelps agrees entirely, noting that when you hit the area where the lungs and heart connect, “you’re running them out of air, and you’re running ’em out of blood very quickly.”
The Strict Rules of Engagement
While the frontal shot is unarguably lethal, it is entirely dependent on the discipline of the hunter. You cannot force this shot. Both Phelps and Dr. Freeman have strict criteria that must be met before they will ever consider letting an arrow fly.
Rule 1: Keep It Close
Because your window is only four to six inches wide, distance is your biggest enemy. “My personal criteria is… at what distance can I hit that football every time a hundred percent of the time,” Dr. Freeman said. For him, 20 to 25 yards is the absolute maximum range.
Inside of 20 yards, a bull simply does not have enough time to react, move, or jump the string before the arrow arrives. Phelps shares this exact standard, stating he wants the elk at 25 yards and under.
If you take this shot at 40 yards and the bull takes a single step as you shoot, that six-inch window vanishes, and you will end up outside of the cavity and possibly embed your arrow into the heavy shoulder bones. That will not result in a dead elk.
Rule 2: True Frontal Only
The bull must be looking at you dead-on. If the elk is even slightly quartering toward you, the shot is a massive risk. “If that thing gets more than about 10 degrees kicked off to each side, if I can see any of his hind hips or anything, I start to think, is this actually a frontal?,” Phelps warned. As soon as the animal rotates, that football-shaped window closes up and becomes hidden behind massive, heavy bone.
Rule 3: Head Up
The elk must be at attention with his head up. “They’ve got to be darn near full head-on… and they need to not be having their head down on the ground,” Dr. Freeman instructs.
If a bull has his head down sniffing the ground, feeding, or drinking, his spine rotates directly into the flight path of your arrow. Trying to thread the needle over the skull and under the spine on a feeding elk is a recipe for disaster.
Rule 4: Elevation Matters
You should only take a frontal shot if you are on the same elevation level as the elk or if the elk is slightly downhill from you. You should almost never shoot a frontal on an elk that is standing uphill from you.
If the bull is above you, your arrow’s upward trajectory will crash directly into his heavy chest plate and sternum before it can reach the vitals. As Phelps explained it, you want your arrow to fly on a path that is parallel to the length of the bull’s body from nose to tail.
Where to Aim and Equipment
So, you have a bull perfectly broadside, head up, standing level at 15 yards. Where exactly do you place your pin?
Many hunters use the color change on an elk’s neck—where the dark brown mane transitions to the lighter tan hide—as a reference point. However, both experts warn against aiming exactly at this line, because the length of a bull’s mane can vary drastically depending on his genetics and the time of year.
Dr. Freeman suggests aiming about two to three inches above where that color change happens. This puts your arrow dead center into the thoracic inlet.
Phelps echoed this, noting that hunters taking the frontal shot often make the mistake of aiming too low and hitting the breastbone. “You need to actually get up into what most people would consider the neck, the throat of the elk,” Phelps said. His rule of thumb is to look at the elk, visualize halfway up its body depth, and place the pin there.
Finally, if you are going to take this shot, you need to shoot an arrow with enough mass to do the job. Phelps cautions against attempting a frontal shot with a very light arrow setup. While the thoracic inlet itself is soft tissue, it’s surrounded by heavy bone.
“My idea is to always drive that arrow as deep into the back of the cavity as I can,” Phelps said. A heavy arrow guarantees that even if your shot is slightly off, you have the momentum required to punch through and cause devastating damage.
Straight Shooting
The frontal shot is certainly not for everyone, and is absolutely not a shot you should take if you’re uncomfortable or lacking confidence at close ranges. It demands incredible patience to pass on the shot if the bull hangs up at 35 yards, if he’s slightly quartering, or if he happens to be standing on a bench above you.
But when the stars align—when you have a screaming bull stomping into your setup and he locks up at 15 yards, staring a hole right through you—you no longer have to wait and pray for him to turn broadside. The anatomy is there. The lethality is unquestionable.
If you stay calm, pick a spot a few inches above the color change, and send a heavy arrow through that football-sized window, you won’t be tracking your bull for hours. You’ll be standing over him in seconds.
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