Boone And Crockett Scoring

Stuck hunter finds huge elk sheds

PENDLETON, Ore. — Getting stuck in the mountains turned into one of the best days of Chris Harer’s life.

In early May, the 25-year-old Pilot Rock hunter stumbled upon a "forbidden secret" location. Rallying his pickup truck near the North Fork of John Day, Harer lodged his 1981 Toyota up to its jacked-up body in mud with an hour left of daylight and no cell phone service available.

"I was freaking out," said his girlfriend Cara Angell. "Our only way out was to climb the mountain for cell service, or we were spending the night with bears and cougars in a freezing thunder storm."

Panicked, Angell tried to save daylight by taking a shortcut with Harer up the mountain. What happened next was nothing short of fate.

As the couple crawled through 6-foot tall buckbrush off the beaten path, Harer noticed what he assumed was a large buck carcass. Upon realizing what he found — a pair of six-point, roughly 360-inch bull elk sheds with 22-inch sabres — his only words for 10 straight minutes were "holy (expletive)!"

"It’s almost like finding gold at the end of a rainbow," said Craig Angell of Athena, who green scored the antlers at 355 inches. "He’s the luckiest hunter in Pilot Rock this year."

Harer lugged the trophies, which weigh 10.2 pounds apiece, about 300 yards up a hill to where Cara called her stepfather in Ukiah for help. Their ride arrived as night fell.

"Her step-dad took one look at them horns, opened up his vest, pointed at his pistol and said, ‘I reckon those ought to be mine now,’ " recalled Harer.

A 360-inch rack is the minimum score for American typical elk antlers to qualify for the Boone and Crockett Club national record book. The Oregon record stands at 378 6/8 inches, taken in Umatilla county in 2006.

Flaunting his massive antlers around Pilot Rock, Harer has received offers for them including a Dodge truck, two guns and $1,000 cash. It took him one hour to promenade from the Pilot Rock Elementary School parking lot to its softball field, mobbed by the community in awe.

"We were all jealous," said Harer’s mother Holly Beers. "We’ve hunted our whole lives and never found anything like that. He gets stuck in the woods and stumbles across horns he can’t even fit in his house."

Harer said the antlers rank among the highlights of his life. For a small-town hunter, he said, they are priceless, like the Holy Grail.

"You don’t see bulls like that out here anymore because they don’t live long enough," said Harer’s uncle, Mike Beers, a local hunter since 1968. "Those horns came off a bull probably 7 or 8 years old — and from the looks of those tines he was quite a killer.

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Scoring White Vibram Five Fingers Sprint

Many archery deer hunters today have set higher personal standards as far as hunting trophy bucks. They seem to be putting more demands on themselves simply to locate a record buck and to harvest it, only to have it put into the book of records. There is one problem with this theory, record bucks are far and few between. Harvesting a record white-tail buck while bowhunting is like winning the lottery, rare, but it can happen and does happen every year.

In the top ten big buck states, Michigan ranks number nine, while Wisconsin is at the number one position. The state of Wisconsin averages about 893,000 hunters each year, while Michigan will average around 1,125,000 white-tail deer hunters per year. Wisconsin has 3,125 Pope & Young bucks and 273 Boone & Crocket bucks. Michigan has 576 Pope & Young, 60 Boone & Crocket bucks in their books. In order to harvest a record buck during your archery hunting season, you must first be able to identify and score a buck out in the field. Now, how often does it happen that you see 150-class or even 160-class bucks out in the field? So how do you know when you do see one? First, practice makes perfect. Go to your local taxidermist and have him or her help you score some of the bucks on the wall. Estimate its inside and outside spread, length of beam, average mass, length and number of points. By practicing on wall mounts, your judgment out in the field will be much easier.

Antler spread is one of the easiest to identify. An average deer in the state of Michigan has a measurement of about 18 inches from tip of ear to ear. You can then estimate the antler spread of the buck you are estimating by using this measurement. But don’t put too much emphasis on this. The inside spread of the antlers is only one total. If it’s 20 inches, then a total of 20 inches is added at the end of the final score.

The length of the beam will be doubled. In other words, if the length of the beams were 20 inches each, then the total would be 40 inches added to the end total. When estimating the length out in the field you should note that most antlers curve backwards before going forward. If the beam curves backward then forward to its nose vibram five fingers kso trek , you are looking at approximately 24 inches. A total of 48 inches would then be added to the end total.

A mass measurement is a little more difficult to identify in the field. Mass is a measurement of the circumference of the antler in four different positions on the beam. A total of 8 measurements are then collected and added to the total. Identifying the mass of an antler should be known by the archery deer hunter as to whether it is heavy or light. Learning the average mass of big white-tail bucks in your area can be critical to the aiding of your measurement in the field. Practice makes perfect!

A Boone and Crockett Field Guide to Measuring and Judging Big Game

Antlers, a guide to collecting, scoring, mounting, and carving

Boone and Crockett Club's 26th Big Game Awards, 2004-2006

Records of North American Whitetail Deer

Whitetail Racks