The helicopter seemed excessive, but after studying the Wyoming elk-hunting unit in detail, it appeared the only way to access thousands of acres of landlocked BLM and state school-trust lands was to come in from the sky.
So we did, five of us, last week. We hired a chopper pilot willing to ferry us the few miles from a county road to a designated two-track road inside the landlocked parcel, and then fetch us at the end of the week. It put the old hunting saw about going in light and coming out heavy on its head. We’d be going in heavy both ways.
The helicopter hire was heavy in another way. I framed my decision to take this drastic action as an appraisal of the land we were about to access. Outfitted hunts here cost between $8,000 and $10,000, the market price based on the exclusive access of landowners in an elk-rich district. If I fretted about landing on top of other public-land hunters, I mainly recognized that we were upsetting the status quo of the West, in which landowners with access profit from it and public hunters are taking more extreme measures to gain a small portion of that access.
But I justified our use of the helicopter as a sort of parity. Our interest in hunting this place was magnified by the exceptional efforts required to access it. A confrontation with landowners was the price of gaining access to land that we hold in mutual – though competing – value.
It wasn’t lost on me that Wyoming is the current hotspot of this West-wide experiment in access: how to get it, how to keep it, and how to reduce the heat-generating friction around competing interests in public land. Our hunt this month follows the precedent-setting high-profile access incident in Wyoming in 2021. In that corner-crossing case, four non-resident elk hunters were charged with trespassing after they crossed from one section of public land to another on adjoining corners. The hunters were later exonerated in a judicial process that confirmed corner crossing is legal in the six Western states in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case was heard. While we didn’t corner cross to get to our public land, we did access it in an unorthodox way.
A Perfect Public-Land Elk Hunt
The front end of our hunt could not have been more perfect. The helicopter delivered the five of us to a state section and we packed our gear to an adjacent BLM section, where camping is allowed. Then we hunted on foot, in an enchanted landscape populated by mature bulls that emerged from cover at last light.
I was the first to tag out. I waited through a dozen good but not remarkable bulls until a wide and long-tined elk fed out from the timber, sparred casually with subordinate bulls, and worked his way off a private parcel onto public land, where legal light, legal ground, and the 175-grain bullet from my 7mm Backcountry intersected with the mature 6×6.
Next morning we were back behind our optics, scanning the landscape for other bulls. We found one, a lone elk dropping into a maze of state-section draws and north-facing timber maybe a mile from our camp. The sighting was encouraging enough to get us to move on the elk, high above a ranch that had been occupied all week with shipping calves out of a series of creekside corrals.
Two Bulls Down
It turned out that the bull we spotted from camp wasn’t the only occupant of the draws. From a ridgeline lookout, we spotted a handful of mature bulls, bedded in the unseasonably warm afternoon. When they roused, we moved, and within 15 minutes the final two of us with tags were done hunting. All that was left was the hard and satisfying process of quartering the bulls. I was hyper aware that our headlamps were bobbing and dodging in direct line of sight with the ranch house in the valley below.
The work done — we elected to leave the meat hanging in junipers and slung over mountain mahogany shrubs — we headed back to camp, spent a short night, and returned to the kill site the next morning.
I hung back but my buddies Ben and David got to the kill site first and, with plenty of time until we arrived, glassed the landscape. Astonishingly, they saw a man in a meadow below them, carrying an elk head and antlers as he hurried toward a patch of timber.
“That looks a lot like Ryan’s rack,” said Ben, who quickly confirmed that Ryan’s antlers were missing from the kill site. “That [expletive] is stealing Ryan’s rack!” Ben shouted, and dumped off the ridge to pursue the horn heister.
Our Hunt Takes a Turn
Ben and David called the man out of the timber, where he had carried the elk rack. After a tense minute, the man emerged from cover, and David started videoing the encounter. The man faced off with Ben, who demanded to know who he was and why he had absconded with the antlers. The man replied, “I’m a hunter.”
“Explain yourself,” Ben said. Ben then shows the man his phone’s screen confirming that they were standing on state-managed public land. “We are right smack-dab in state land. Public as it gets.”
“I don’t want you hunting on this outfit,” says the man, who was later identified as the rancher and landowner whose property — private ranchland that can’t be crossed without permission — landlocks the public land we hunted.
“It’s not going to stop,” said Ben. “It’s public land. We got here legally.”
The standoff ends with the rancher helping retrieve Ryan’s elk rack, which he had stashed under a steep cutbank that would have been well out of sight to even sharp-eyed passers-by.
‘Reverse Poaching’
“The whole thing was like reverse poaching,” observes Ryan Chuckel, the Wisconsin hunter whose antlers were stolen by the landowner. “At first, we didn’t quite know what to do, because it was so shocking and unexpected. But the more we considered the incident, the more it seemed we had an obligation to report it to the authorities. We imagined how the landowner might have reacted had he caught us trespassing on his private land. He would have thrown the book at us.”
After our party convened at Chuckel’s kill site and the shock of the incident receded, we packed meat and antlers back to camp, where the helicopter picked us up a couple days later.
Once out of the backcountry, we met with Wyoming Game and Fish wardens, who noted that they had never heard of such an incident in which a landowner stole a hunters’ animal or part of an animal. Wardens are considering hunter harassment charges while county law enforcement is investigating the incident for criminal theft charges.
“I don’t want you hunting on this outfit.”
The latter charge would stem from the monetary costs Chuckel incurred for the hunt, including the helicopter hire, license fees, travel from Wisconsin, and food.
“The helicopter definitely elevated this from a routine buddy hunt to more of an adventure,” says Chuckel, “but it is such an aggressive move that it also probably escalated frictions [between hunters and landowners].”
Indeed, the root of the incident lies at the intersection of exceptional hunting opportunities and drum-tight public access. But to Chuckel, much of the hunt is beyond price. Those aspects are every bit as meaningful as the hard costs that could have been stolen by the antler-thieving landowner.
“You’re talking about a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which I don’t know how you put a monetary value on,” he says. “Those are values based on scarcity. I can’t draw this tag every year, which means I might have to wait up to ten years just to have the opportunity.”
It would be inappropriate to extrapolate this isolated incident as a condemnation of Western landowners everywhere, a perspective I gained from relating my experience to Randy Newberg, a good friend and leader in the public-lands access conversation.
“I fear something like what you experienced could be construed by some hunters as ‘all ranchers are bad,’” he observed. “Our communities are getting so divided and polarized that something like this could be a wedge to further divide us. But just like we keep saying that not all the hunting community is a monolith, I think it’s important to stress that the ranching community isn’t a monolith. This was just one unfortunate incident.”
He’s right, but it’s also correct to observe that the incident stems from mutual passion for the same ground. Our party was obviously ready and able to go to extremes to access the ground, just as the landowner apparently went to extremes to preserve his exclusive access to it. The difference: We followed the law.
The post Watch: A Landowner Stole My Buddy’s Public-Land Elk to Deter Us from ‘Hunting This Outfit’ appeared first on Outdoor Life.
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