LOL...I'm from pa guys so our local butchers around here are a heck of a lot cheaper than what you guys have out west.  I think what shocked me the most out of the whole thing was the high cost of butchering out there.  I think I paid 150 for a mulie and I thought it was highway robbery!  If I bring back a quartered elk all they'll have to do is run it through the saw and wrap it.  The tenderloins and straps will already be taken care of and whatever is left from the steaks will just be roasts.  He'll have it done in no time.  Heck, even if it took him an hour(which it won't) that's 300 bucks an hour to process an elk!  I think the butchers out there jack their prices up because they know that nobody wants to deal with an elk and most guys out there are already spending a few grand on a hunt, especially out of staters going through an outfitter.  This increases their demand and therefore they can charge a heck of a lot more. 

The deer processors are high here in MS.  Issue of supply and demand.  Lot of animals here and relatively small number of processors.  Lot of hunters don't want to mess with processing a dozen or more animals a season.  We have a bag limit of 3 bucks and 5 does a year per hunter and the state game department mantra is "shoot more does", so a family with pop and 2 kids hunting, each being allowed a full limit even though the kids under 16 are license exempt, on good range could easily have 10+ deer a year to put up.  At the local processing fees they could easily spend in excess of a grand a year and that is without doing a lot of extra such as smoked sausage, summer sausage, and breakfast sausage @$2.00-2.50 per pound on top of a base processing fee of about $0.65 per hanging pound.

I took my elk into trinidad CO and talked the only meat processor in town to do it for $175. I took 56 lbs of coarse ground meat to Steves in Denver for pepperoni sticks, brats, italian sausage for $305.

A group camped next to us brought out a 22Cu. Ft. freezer, meat slicers, meat grinders, vacuum sealers, tables under a 14X14 screen tent, and a buddy that just had back surgery that could not hunt, but use to processing game in the hunting seasons. Just to add to that they also had a satallite dish with a 46" flat screen mounted outside the RV to watch the football games by the campfire. It probably cost them more, but in the long run, man thats the way to go.

WOW a on site butcher in the wild! big screen tv,cant ask for much more I guess! Maybe someone to go shoot my elk while I watch the game huh?