by Bill Hintze RMEF Life Member Houston, Texas
At the very first RMEF Big Game Banquet and auction in Houston, I successfully bid on a six-day elk and mule deer hunt on the Royal Teton Ranch in southwestern Montana. The hunt was donated by Edwin Johnson on the Royal Teton Ranch.Having just returned from this excursion, I can tell you it was like a dream come true. Royal Teton Ranch covers 12,000 acres of beautiful mountainous country, including some six miles of common boundary with Yellowstone National Park.
When heavy snows make the high plateau untenable, thousands of elk migrate northward out of the park to winter range on lands along the Yellowstone River. The RMEF has been instrumental in acquiring and maintaining some of these properties as wildlife habitat, rather than allowing them to be subdivided.
After arriving at the ranch, I spent much of my first afternoon settling into quarters and meeting people. There were several other hunters, including Gen. Chuck Yeager and former space shuttle commander Gen. Joe Engle.
Before first light the next morning, our guide Wade Peck led the way up a snowy path pock-marked with elk tracks. Temperatures were below zero, but the exertion had us unzipping our coldweather gear to prevent overheating. We picked stands along the flanks of ridges in hopes of intercepting bucks and bulls which might be returning up from a night's feeding in the valley. With dawn, two shots echoed across the main divide to the north. Six cows stood near the crest. They drifted down a separate nose one-half mile away.
I glassed the heights in the direction of the firing, and saw two bull elk slowly descending the next finger ridge to my right. I thought they would continue to follow that trail, offering me a broadside target at about 200 yards. Instead, they turned right and headed for black timber in the intervening drainage. My only chance was to be at long range.
I took a firm sitting position with elbows on knees. The distance looked to be more than 350 yards. With my .338 Winchester targeted for 250 yards, I held five inches above the withers of the significantly larger bull and squeezed.
It took Wade and me nearly 20 minutes to traverse the slick slopes and treacherous snow-covered deadfall to reach the elk. The bull carried a well balanced 6x6 rack. Twenty-inch sword and royal tines crowned 54-inch beams, and the spread exceeded four feet. When the antlers were evaluated later, they scored 362 Boone and Crockett points. While my Royal Teton elk clearly is a "bull of a lifetime," it surely is not going to stop me from continuing to seek this most regal game. The pristine environment and the congenial camaraderie that surrounds western wapiti hunting are too stimulating to abandon.
Not all auctioned offerings turn out so successfully. However, some of my most outstanding trophies and most scintillating experiences have been on auction-donated hunts. And I'm sure that outfitters are always going to give it their best when they offer an elk hunt to a member of the Elk Foundation at an RMEF fund-raising event. I strongly recommend these hunts to all RMEF members, to say nothing of the vital uses the funds generated perform.
