I've never lived in any place where bugling was common - regardless of what the video and Internet experts tell you. I've lived and hunted for elk in three different states and even the heard at a well known elk farm in Utah didn't bugle very much, personally I think that bugling is overrated and in general a waste of time. I now live on the edge of a large national forest in southwest Montana, several miles from anybody else with a nice grassy field about 100 yards from the house and I've heard two elk bugle this year - and that's with a small group of bulls that come out to eat that grass almost every night. I wont argue that if bugling will work it'll work best during the rut and I've seen videos of guys using a bugle very successfully but I really don't believe that it's as useful as people have been led to believe, at least not in northern Arizona, northern Utah, and SW Montana.
What works best for me is to scout the places that are difficult to get in to, with good water and cover. They like to travel rough draws that have running water at the bottom and then they like to find nice flat benches in heavy forest with small grass parks close by. The elk only come out of the trees at nightfall and my favorite ambush technique is to catch them as they are moving back up to their beds from sunrise to 10 am. After 10 am most of them are pretty much settled in to their daytime bedding spot and you wont get to them very easily without spooking the heard so I spend the daytime finding a good spot to spot from and look within the trees for elk so that I can do a better job of planning the next ambush attempt.
As for weather, all of Montana had a cooler than normal summer this year (as well as a colder than normal winter last year) so, relatively speaking, it wasn't as hot as normal. In fact, most of the common elk hunting areas are already seeing snow this year - we had snow at my house just yesterday and I'm only at 5500 feet. The grasses are still fairly green on most areas of SW Montana. I will admit though, west of the Divide the weather is wetter and cooler than east of the Divide so we see slightly different weather over here than most of the state.
