The North Dakota Badlands are home to some of the country’s most impressive elk, and a local hunter has already set the bar high for the 2026 season with a standout bull that green grossed close to 400 inches. Austin Streifel shot the bull on state land while hunting with his wife and a close friend, he tells Field & Stream.
“I’ve been putting in for an elk tag since I was 12 years old,” says Streifel, now 27. “I was shaking so bad with excitement when I saw the results back in April that I couldn’t even text my dad to tell him I’d drawn the tag.”
Streifel’s odds of drawing the tag were less than 1 percent, he says. The original tag was good for E4, a Badlands unit that borders Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Unlike other states, North Dakota does not give out preference points to longtime applicants for the state’s coveted elk tags.
Badlands Bulls
Once prolific in the Badlands, elk were nearly extirpated from the area by the late 1800s. By the time Theodore Roosevelt acquired his famous Elkhorn Ranch along the banks of the Little Missouri River in 1884, sprawling elk herds were already a thing of the past in the North Dakota Badlands. “The stately and splendid deer, the lordliest of its kind throughout the world, is now fast vanishing,” T.R. wrote, in his 1888 book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
Elk did vanish from the state until 1985, when the National Park Service reintroduced 47 (8 bulls and and 39 cows) to the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Within a few decades, that population soared to more than 1,000 elk, and herds began spilling over to adjacent state-owned and private land.
Finding a Badlands Giant
“I probably did 50 hours of scouting in the field and 30 hours of e-scouting in E4,” Streifel says. “And that scouting turned up some nice bulls.”
He had one of those bulls in his crosshairs, just 200 yards away, on the second day of the season. “It was every bit of 360 inches, but I couldn’t bring myself shoot it just two days into the season,” he says. “My wife had hiked in with me. She thought I was crazy when I let it walk over the hill. But I knew there were better bulls out there.”
A few days later, Streifel’s decision to pass on the 360-class bull paid off. “I was back in Fargo working when my buddy started sending me photos and videos of an even bigger bull he’d found in E4,” he says. In North Dakota, E3 tag holders are allowed to hunt Unit E4 as well after the first few days of the season. E3 is a much smaller unit located inside E4.
“Its fronts and its tops were giant,” Streifel recalls. “We’re talking 24-inch eye guards. I knew right away—that was the bull I was looking for.”
Streifel left Fargo at 1:30 A.M. that night, September 11. He hiked 2.5 miles into the spot with his wife and the friend who’d located the bull in that same area. “We got in there around 4:15 A.M., and bulls were screaming everywhere,” he says. “When daylight hit, I could see cows and raghorns all over the place, then I spotted the giant bull we were after about 600 yards away.”
The Stalk
The trio crawled on hands and knees an additional 100 yards to a nearby knob. “The crawl to the knob gave me time to calm my nerves,” Streifel says. “I’d rung the bell at the range from 500 yards before. I knew I could pull that shot off. I just had to let the rifle do the work.”
At a distance of 508 yards, the longest shot he’s ever taken at an animal, Streifel exhaled and squeezed the trigger on his 7mm PRC. The bullet dropped in right behind the shoulder, just above the heart, he says, and the bull spun around 180 degrees.
Then he squeezed off a second shot on the same spot behind the opposite shoulder. “He took twenty steps away from us and laid down. When I turned and looked at my wife and my buddy, they said I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t even smiling.”
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Striefel’s bull sported a perfectly symmetrical 6X6 frame. From tip to tip, the spread stretched for 37 inches. Both main beams were well over 50-inches long. He says the bull green grossed at 394 inches with an expected net score about 387.
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