Colorado Muley
*Straight out of the Hunting Journal*
Day Four
October 20th, 2009
I decided last night that with this weather rolling in I’d like to have Dad and Joel drop me off at the top of my ridge. I had a good feeling.
Well, we climbed ******** mostly at dark and took the left leading down my ridge. On the way down the hill we spotted a doe off to the right in the sage. All you could see was her head.
I got dropped off at the Y, just before you get to the top of the big draw. I had service so I told them I’d call if I got anything.
Anyways, they turned around and went up the hill, and I started walking down the road. It opened up into a sage flat on top and I spotted a lone doe. She just stood and watched me the whole time without bolting.
The overgrown road continued on down the ridge but I couldn’t see the upper end of the draw from the road so I hiked over to the edge and glassed the upper end for a few minutes. Nothing, so I cut back up to the road and continued on.
After only 20-30 yards the road sloped down and I broke out into another sage flat. I was maybe 50 yards into it when I spotted an ass on the other end of it in the junipers. It was big bodied and had a light color to it similar to the buck Joel missed last night. Had to be a buck. I couldn’t see the head so I edged out into the sage and buckbrush to the left about ten yards to where I had an angle to see. I could only see the rack on his right side through the junipers. He was tall and heavy so I knew I was going to shoot it. I dropped my pack down on some buckbrush next to a little tree, knelt down, and drew a bead. He was quartered away to the right looking back, and I put the crosshairs right behind the shoulder. BANG! WHACK! The bullet hit him hard, I could tell just by the sound. After the recoil I looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere. He was down.
I wanted to find my empty but couldn’t this second so I dropped my pack and sprinted all the way down there to where the buck was. I eased through the junipers keeping an eye out for him when I caught movement to my right. Oh my god… All I could see were horns and an old white roman nosed face. He was gigantic. He kicked a little and without thinking I put a round in his neck to finish him off.
He was an absolute monster 5x3 with 2-3 inch eyeguards, mass like no other, and both tall and wide. I nearly got sick with adrenaline and awe that I had. I got down and grabbed him, checking out the fifth point on his one side. It was a crown, all three points coming out of the same base. Unbelievable.
After a minute of awe I got on the phone and called my dad. I told him something to the effect that I’d just killed the biggest buck I’d ever seen! He just kept saying Hello? Hello? Shoot, I couldn’t get a call out so I sent him a text saying the same thing.
Now I was really feeling nauseous so I hiked back up to my pack and looked for my empty. I couldn’t find it and was now really feeling like I was going to faint or be sick. I just laid my pack down in the road and lay down by it trying to calm down.
A couple minutes later I could hear dad and Joel heading down the ridge. I got up and imitated the biggest rack I could with my arms above my head. They were both wide-eyed and grinning. When they got up to me I spilled my story to them in about thirty seconds, and they said to jump in. I told them where to stop and ran down to my buck. They were speechless when they laid eyes on him. An absolute brute.
We got several good pictures and then I realized we should measure how wide he was. Joel grabbed a tape from the truck, only about 30 yards up the hill from the buck on the overgrown road, and we measured it. We weren’t sure what tines to measure between because of his fifth point. His main frame was 27.5”, and with his kicker at least 28-29”. He was every bit as big as Joel’s bruiser from unit ** a few years back.
We got him gutted and in the back of the truck headed for the meat shop by 9:30. It was just perfect. Huge buck, easy drag, and still early enough to hunt. We took the fence line back to camp just in case we saw any deer, which we didn’t, and to show Joe and Norm but they were still out.
At the meat shop, when the buck was getting skinned we told the lady we’d have it caped out to be mounted. You just had to mount a buck that big. The guy, the meat cutter, found my bullet in the base of the bucks neck from the kill shot. It’s pretty cool to have.
*End of journal entry*
Once the old timers in camp saw it, they said it was by far the biggest buck that they'd seen in that unit in their 40 years of hunting it.
That ridge was the same ridge I've killed bucks off the last 3 years in a row now. This is the first one on my ridge, the first two were on the other side of the draw.
When I dropped him off with Charlie to be mounted, we measured him and he came out to 180 5/8 gross, and 29 inches wide.
