If the head was darker than the body, that’s an elk.
Pretty much totally uniform in color, a redish brown with a slighty lighter tail but no black visible.
That’s what got me, I’ve see, huge blacktail bucks, they are beige-grayish, and these weighed in at a minimum of 550 lbs or so so they WERE NOT blacktail...
Incidentally, I actually did see a whitetail here, she was running along a path near the lake and I startled her so she was flapping her tail up and down, being originally from the East Coast I’ve seen thousands of them.