In the fall of 2003, I headed out west to the Black Hill Mountains on the border of Wyoming and South Dakota to hunt for Rocky Mountain elk. On this trip, I found much more than I'd been hoping for.
The outfitter was the owner of a large ranch.
I would be staying in an old log cabin that had once been the ranch bunkhouse.
Using the ranch as a base camp, we would ride out to hunt in the mountains to the east until the end of each day.
We’d start out from the ranch each morning and search the various mountain meadows, hoping to find the elk before they retreated back into the timber for the day.
Later on in the day, we would try to locate a bull by bugle calling.
Luck finally came our way when very late in the day, in response to our calling, we found a small herd of cows at the edge of a small meadow.
Just inside the timber was the herd bull.
One shot later, I had the trophy of the lifetime.
A beautiful 8 x 7 bull measuring 397 gross and scoring 379 Boone and Crockett.
The taxidermist did a fine job and in a few months, I had a great bugling elk mount ready to put up on the wall.
