This story, “Best Elk in 82 Years,” was originally published in the March 1981 issue of Outdoor Life.
When my 18-year-old son Dale and I left camp before dawn that November morning we knew we were headed for trouble. The good elk country is several miles uphill from our camp near the Panther River in Alberta, Canada, so we ride horses up there before hunting on foot. We couldn’t ride all the way this time because the temperature was 24 below.
When it’s that cold you don’t have enough body movement to keep warm on a horse. The extreme cold works through even the best of woolens, and it begins to jab into you like tiny slivers of ice. We had to dismount many times and lead our horses until we restored enough body warmth to ride again.
Dawn was a lemon-yellow brightening in a cloudless sky. There wasn’t a breath of wind. It seemed as though the world was locked inside a giant deep freeze. But there was only about six inches of snow on the ground and it was hard and crisp, the kind that makes for easy walking.
I left Dale in thick spruce and jackpine near the bottom of Heartbreak Hill. He’d taken a giant six-point elk several days earlier, now he was going to try for a mule deer buck in the lower elevations. The elk would be higher, so I tied my horse and started climbing.
Heartbreak Hill is well named, mostly because its slopes angle upward anywhere from about 45 to 70 degrees. Its south side shows open grassy slopes that offer ideal winter range for elk. Its north side is covered with heavy pine and spruce forests that provide excellent cover for the big animals. The hill is about two miles long and half a mile high. It butts up against Barrier Mountain that peaks in solid rock at an elevation of 8,200 feet. The mountain is one boundary of Banff National Park.
Banff harbors a big herd of elk in summer. When winter comes, and the snow gets too deep and the temperature too low, the animals move down to lower elevations. They go through three passes, Dormer, Red Deer, and the Panther. When the weather turns extremely cold, as it had the last few days, it’s almost a sure thing that elk will be moving downhill.
That’s why I chose to climb Heartbreak Hill. It’s only a few miles from the park’s boundary, but its slopes are dangerous challenges for hunters. When you mix a few inches of snow with long blades of dead and frozen grass you have a very slippery combination. If you slip and fall on those steep slopes you may slide a long way before you stop, and if. you stop suddenly it will probably be when you crash into a tree or deadfall.
All of this was nothing new to me. I’d been hunting Alberta’s big-game country for more than 30 years, and I’d spent a good share of the past 20 hunting seasons as a part-time guide. I’d packed out or helped to pack out a lot of bull elk and bighorn sheep from this Panther River country. I knew how to hunt the area, and I knew that the weather conditions on this morning of November 21, 1977 were ideal for spotting elk on the move.
These thoughts were going through my mind as I struggled on up toward Barrier Mountain. As I began getting close to the top of Heartbreak, I found myself worrying more about my rifle and the 4X Weaver scope than about the chance of seeing elk. I wondered if the old Model 70 Winchester .338 would fire in the extreme cold. I had no thought at all of seeing a truly outstanding bull.
I was born in Trochu, Alberta, in 1932. We lived on a farm where my parents raised cattle and grew grain. My dad was a dedicated outdoorsman, and on my fifth birthday he told me I could begin shooting his .22 rifle. He put a can on a fence post, balanced the rifle for me, and told me how to line up the sights. I couldn’t hit the can, but just being able to shoot a gun was exciting enough.
When I was nine, dad gave me permission to hunt on my own. I didn’t have much trouble getting sitting rabbits.
My hunting fever would come to a boil whenever dad brought home a deer, moose, or elk. I would stand and admire those huge animals by the hour, dreaming of the day when I’d be able to go on a big-game hunt. In Alberta, that magic time is your 14th birthday. That’s the day you become old enough to get a big-game hunting license.
That fall dad and two of his hunting partners took me into rugged wilderness 130 miles northwest of our farm. We made the last 12 miles of the trip with a team of horses and a sleigh. The sleigh was packed with hunting gear, groceries, and hay and oats for the horses.
In the middle of the old trapper’s cabin where we stayed there was a framed box filled with soil. The soil supported a stove that had been fashioned from a 45-gallon steel drum. Its side had been flattened to provide a cooking surface. When that big stove was filled with blazing wood the cabin was warm as toast. But when the fire went out, the sub-zero outside cold leaked in fast through holes where chinking had fallen from the log walls. We tried filling the holes with whatever would stick in them, but we spent a lot of time cutting wood with a saw.
The big thing I vividly remember about that hunt was the tongue-lashing dad gave me after I pulled a dumb stunt. He had left me on top of a thinly treed hill, and had told me to walk to the end of the hill then wait for him to come back. His plan was to hike out of the valley below and try to flush an animal past my waiting spot. I didn’t realize that it would take him a long time to work out of the valley in foot-deep snow. I finally decided to walk over to the next hill.
I got over there, waited a while, then attempted to take a shorter route back. The farther I walked the denser the timber became. I knew I was lost, but I kept trying to find my way back to the first hill. It was late afternoon by the time dad found me. He had followed my tracks in the snow, and he was really mad.
The next year my family moved to the Pincher Creek area. Our farm was right in the heart of great hunting and fishing country. I hated to leave the area, but three years later we moved again and settled on a farm near Torrington. It’s still my home. Our farm, which my brother Allan and I have operated since our father’s death in 1959, covers 1,280 acres of mixed crop and pasture land. We raise oats, barley, and rape, and we have a cow-calf operation of 120 animals. There are a lot of whitetail and mule deer in the coulees and draws, and we get our share. Fishing is also great.
We can’t get serious about hunting until the end of October. There’s no time to spare until the crops are combined, the fields are worked, and winter feed is put up for our cattle.
About 20 years ago Allan, myself, Art Schneider, and Ron and Victor Smith put our horses and hunting equipment together so we could get an outfitter’s license. In those early years we had to use packhorses to get into the Panther country. We had 21 horses, two big tents, and a full line of packing equipment. We were basically interested in our own hunting, but we brought in some client hunters.
One year our group and our clients got 37 elk. We packed them all out by horse, eight miles down to where our vehicles were parked. A few of us would take out a load of elk meat about twice a week. On our return trip we’d bring back more hunters, plus oats for the horses and supplies for camp.
After a few years of hunting in this way, Victor Smith quit because of failing . health. When Victor retired, Allan and I decided to start our own camp about half a mile away. The Smith/ Schneider camp and ours are still going strong, and so are our friendships.
Right here I better tell you more about Art Schneider and his horse Old Pal because both play roles in the rest of my story. Art is 46, a married farmer, and he drives a school bus. He’s one of the best hunters I’ve ever met, and Old Pal turned out to be the most reliable horse Art ever had in camp.
Years ago Old Pal-was a chuck-wagon horse. Her original owner ran her in the chuck-wagon competition at the Calgary Stampede. When she became too slow for racing, Art bought her at an auction. It took him two years to break the horse into routine hunting work, mostly because she would want to race away every time somebody would get on her back. But she was very intelligent, and she eventually learned to do what Art wanted.
She had a sixth sense about making the many and often dangerous crossings of the Panther River. During hunting season, the river can become very treacherous because of ice. As temperatures drop, shoreline ice keeps freezing ever closer to the middle of the river. Though the river isn’t wide — normally about 50 yards across-its water runs very swift over large rocks.
Heavy runoff can change the river’s water level suddenly and drastically. Chunks of shoreline ice break away and rush downstream with enough force to often form jam-ups. These jam-ups will back up a lot of water in the same way a dam does. When the back-up pressure gets heavy enough the build-up of ice will burst. Sometimes a wall of water six to eight feet high will come crashing down the valley. No man or horse can survive such raging walls of ice and water.
Old Pal could sense when it was safe to cro.ss the river. Sp.e was always the first horse to break ice and determine the best route. She was steady and would never get excited when ice chunks broke loose. She could tell if there was too much ice and whether or not the water depth would allow safe crossing. She had that same uncanny ability for being sure-footed when we hunted bighorn sheep far up in the mountains.
Our camps are on Crown Land that is open to public hunting. In recent years we’ve been able to get all the way to the camps with 4 WO trucks, bringing the horses with us, but we have to cross the Panther at five different shallow areas because there are no bridges. Allan and I have two trucks, the biggest is a threequarter-ton Ford with a winch.
Though camp is only 115 miles from home, it takes about seven hours to make the trip. The last eight miles are the roughest. It’s unusual if we don’t get at least one truck stuck or bogged down in the river. That winch gets a lot of use.
Our camp’s main tent is 16 x 20 feet and has six-foot walls. We use the back part for sleeping quarters. Our beds are bales of straw covered with tarps, foam mattresses, and top quality sleeping bags. A big homemade stove (we use chainsaws to cut up dead spruce trees for wood) heats the entire tent. Near the stove is a large homemade cupboard that holds groceries and supplies.
Our other tent is 9×12. It houses our saddles and pack gear, and oats and hay for the horses. We take in eight horses when we set up camp just before the hunting season opens. The only protection they have from the severe weather is the thick stand of spruce trees that surrounds our campsite.
Allan and I take turns in camp. Each of us is in for a week, then out the next. We have to do this because one of us has to feed cattle and do the chores back on our farm.
Allan and my son Dale had been in camp the week before I got my elk. Our pre-arranged schedule called for a meeting at the third river crossing around noon on Saturday. Allan would be on his way home, I’d be going into camp with more hunters.
My youngest son, 11-year-old Ronald, was with me. So was Don Williams, a 49-year-old fertilizer dealer, and Larry Weimer, a 30-year-old farmer. Both men are good friends who wanted to get in some hunting. Ronald was going along for the excitement.
There was about four inches of snow on the ground when we got up the first crossing of the Panther. There we put chains on all four wheels of both trucks we were driving. When we arrived at the third crossing nobody was there. We bounced and weaved the trucks on uphill for an hour before we met my brother and son coming down. The first thing I noticed in Allan’s truck was an enormous elk rack. Dale was all smiles. There wasn’t any question of who’d shot the bull.
“Try to beat this one, pops,” Dale said.
Well, a man shouldn’t be outdone by his son, so I answered, “Little bulls like that one we leave a year or so to grow up.”
The kidding stopped in a hurry because the six-point rack was so massive (it later officially scored 366, just nine short of making the Boone and Crockett record book) it demanded serious conversation. Allan and I agreed that the antlers were probably the best ever taken from our camp. Then I said to Dale, “Let’s hear your story.”
“I started hunting below Heartbreak by walking small hills right after dawn,” Dale began. “It was snowing so hard I couldn’t see much of anything. When I was about halfway up Heartbreak it quit snowing so I decided to stop and look things over. Right away I spotted three big bulls feeding about 200 yards away. Then I spotted two more elk bedded in the edge of the trees below me. They were bulls too. I could hardly believe there were five trophy bulls in sight.
“I dropped prone and looked them all over closely with my 4X Bushnell scope. Four of the five bulls had six points on each side, the other one had five. They didn’t know I was there. The best bull was one of the three I’d spotted first. Everything was happening so fast I didn’t have time to get excited. I leveled my 7 mm. Remington Magnum and touched off. I heard the 145-grain bullet hit with a whomp. The bull turned, ran a few steps, and then collapsed. That’s when buck fever came over me, but I got him fielddressed, and it was only 11 o’clock when I got back to camp.”
We talked a while, then Allan headed for home while Dale joined my group. By the time we arrived at the last river crossing it was iced up far more than I expected. We used a pry bar and axes to clear away enough ice to let our trucks pass, and then drove the last mile to camp.
In Alberta hunting is prohibited on Sunday, so we spent the next day cutting a pile of wood, adjusting saddles and bridles, and preparing hunting equipment. The temperature was falling rapidly by evening. It was well below zero outside when we went to bed. I put the alarm clock inside my sleeping bag. I wanted to make sure it would ring on schedule at 4 a.m.
It did, and I can’t ever remember crawling out of a sleeping bag into such bitter cold. I got the stove going and loaded more wood into it than I should have. Then I dressed and fed the horses. By that time the stove was far hotter than I thought it was. I loaded a pan with bacon, and it began smoking almost immediately. Within moments the extreme heat created such a smoke screen I had to throw back the tent flap. By now everybody was wide awake and coughing and very quick with kind words for the cook.
“Why in the so and so don’t you learn how to cook!” growled Don Williams.
“Wow,” my son Ronald yelled and ducked back into his sleeping bag.
Larry Weimer is the quiet type. He just stared at me while muttering, “Great way to start the day.”
After we finished the burned-up breakfast, Dale and I saddled up and rode out into the almost unbearable cold.
A couple of hours later, as I was climbing close to the top of Heartbreak, I moved about even with a big valley that extends over to Gap Ridge. The bottom of this valley is heavily timbered with large spruce and jackpines, but where it edges up against the slope I was climbing the timber thins to a few small pines. I was about 300 yards away from the last pines-in the open on the grassy slope-when I stopped to get my breath.
As soon as I stopped I heard something that sounded like the cracking of branches. At first I thought I was hearing things, but when the sounds came again I realized I hadn’t been mistaken. Something was breaking branches in the timbered valley more than a quarter of a mile away. I could hear the noises plainly because the extremely cold morning was dead still.
I’d heard such sounds before. They’re the pistol-like reports a bull elk makes when his antlers crash through dead branches while he’s trotting or running. I stood motionless for a few seconds, then I realized that the sounds were getting louder. The animal or animals were coming my way. I figured that a bull might burst out of the timber in a hurry, so I readied my old Winchester.
Two bulls materialized. The biggest trotted through the last fringe of sunsplashed trees first. His head was high and his glistening antlers were laid back. The beams were so long they extended almost to his flanks, and they appeared to be at least five feet wide. I had never seen an elk as large as this one.
I was aware that the other bull was a large six-pointer. But there was no comparison between the two animals. The first bull was so huge in all respects he commanded my complete attention.
I think he saw me out there on the open slope because he began quartering away as soon as he cleared the pines. I’ve shot a lot of big-game animals and I normally have no trouble at all with buck fever, but I’ll admit I was dumbfounded by that bull. The range was 200 yards, and I excitedly triggered my first shot before I got a proper sight picture. The huge bull slumped a bit when the 200-grain Hornady bullet hit him high in the front leg, but he kept going. A well-placed bullet from my Winchester will stop any elk in his tracks, so I knew right away that I’d shot too fast.
When you’re in a situation like this, and you know that your trophy of a lifetime is getting away, it’s extremely difficult to control yourself. But I did, and I put the second slug into the base of his neck. The bull dropped. When his body hit the very steep slope it immediately began sliding downhill. I watched in awe as the massive black shape picked up speed and began plowing snow.
The bull slid like a runaway sleigh for 80 yards before he crashed into small pines edging a V -shaped gulley. I heard branches smashing as the carcass disappeared from my view, then everything became dead still. I glanced back up the slope. The smaller bull was standing motionless, staring at me. I noted that his main beams would measure about 50 inches long and that his antler spread was about 45 inches. A trophy for sure, but his rack appeared to be much smaller than the one carried by the bull I’d killed. The realization of this fact just about overwhelmed me as I watched the animal turn and run back toward heavy timber.
I looked downhill for Dale, and spotted him climbing in my direction. He was having a rough time making progress on a steep sidehill. When he stopped for a breather I waved my cap. He picked up the movement, then zeroed in on my position.
Half an hour later Dale met me near the gulley. The first sign we saw of my bull was one antler sticking out of a snowdrift. The sight stopped us in our tracks. “Well, pops,” Dale said, “Your bull beats mine by a lot.”
The 1,000-pound elk had taken a lot of snow with him when he skidded into the gulley, so we had an enormous job of pushing and pulling before we could get the carcass on its back for fielddressing. We agreed that the antlers were at least a fifth larger than any elk rack we’d ever seen. I spent a lot of time near the fire we’d started with dead branches-you need a fire when field-dressing big animals in temperatures well below zero or you’ 11 freeze your hands-but mostly I just stared at those amazing antlers.
We finally propped the elk’s chest cavity open with branches, then headed for camp. On the way we met Art Schneider who was headed up to hunt the same area. We told him where my bull was. That evening Art stopped at our tent and said, “Clarence, your bull is the biggest elk this country has ever seen. It sure would be a shame if those antlers got damaged while you’re packing them off the hill. I’d like to take Old Pal up there and help you out.”
Read Next: The Real Story Behind the Casey Brooks Bull, the Pending World Record Elk
It was unbelievable how carefully that horse treated those antlers the next morning. She seemed to know there was something special about them because she took a lot of time working out the best routes along the steep hills. When we got down into heavy timber the horse maneuvered between trees so that the antlers on her back seldom touched even a twig. Several times she stopped because she sensed that the antlers were too wide to get through limbs. The horse wouldn’t move until we cut the branches that were in her way.
When we reached camp we found Ron Smith, Art’s brother-in-law, waiting with a tape measure. We were all familiar with the Boone and Crockett scoring system because we’re members of the Central Alberta Big Game Trophy Club, but Ron was an official scorer. He kept shaking his head in wonderment as he made measurements and wrote down numbers. When he added them up he said, “The antlers will shrink a bit during the required 60-day drying period. But I’ll tell you Clarence, your elk will be in the top five for sure.”
It turned out to be the third best on the all-time list. The final official score lists the right antler length at 62 3/8 inches, the left 62 2/8. The inside spread is 49 2/8. All of those measurements are a few better than the comparable dimensions of the No. 1 elk taken by John Piute in Colorado in 1899, but Piute’ s trophy scored higher because its tines were longer and thicker. My trophy has six points on the right side, eight on the left. Total Boone and Crockett points come to 419 6/8. By way of comparison, the No. 1 elk, shot by Phite in 1899, scored 442 3/8. The No. 2 elk on the all-time list, shot by an unknown hunter in 1890, has a total score of 441 6/8. In other words, good fortune and hard hunting brought me the best elk taken in more than 80 years.
One of the most astonishing statistics is the 41-pound weight of the antlers. Imagine that! My bull was carrying a battering ram on his head. No wonder I could hear branches breaking like pistol shots when that big bull was running toward me.
Read the full article here
