Today was a good day…

[venado_hunter]

Great buck and story!

 

[Adamsfj]

Congratulations thanks for sharing

 

[Geewhiz]

Congrats on a sweet buck! It would be cool to see a regular photo that isn’t a fish eye type angle. From the photos you posted it’s difficult to actually see what he is.

 

[Jason277]

I hurried back to my pack, grabbed my loose items and began angling down the slope in a way that I could keep an eye on the bottom of the drainage but also contour around to where the buck had been mid-slide so that I could look for blood and follow the slide down the slope, hopefully to his resting place.

To keep my footing I had to put on my microspikes and was really wishing I hadn’t left my trekking poles in the truck. It took about 20 minutes to work my way around the ravine until I came to the slide. It looked like a bobsled track in the snow with a bright red stripe down the middle. I was relieved to see so much blood, confirming that I hadn’t just blown out a leg or made a non-fatal shot.

I continued to descend, marveling at all the big overturned rocks and logs with big tufts of buck hair still stuck to them. When I was about 100 yards from the bottom of the ravine I pulled up my binos and glassed the bottom and was relieved to see a leg sticking up out of the tangle of slide Alder and willows.

When I finally got down to where the buck slid to a stop my jaw dropped at the sheer size of his body - the biggest-bodied mule deer I have ever laid hands on. I had to grit my teeth to yank him out of the tangle to get a look at his antlers, and then my jaw dropped again . “ THE MASS !”, I literally said out loud. He had that look of a buck somewhat past his prime- heavy all the way through, compact, but shorter tined than a 6-7 year old peak growth buck. I knew he wasn’t a great scoring buck, no 200”er for sure but it didn’t matter to me. I love these old, crusty, black-horned mountain bucks. I’ve always wanted one like this and here he was, finally in my hands.
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Unreal!!

 

[Dust Rider]

Great write up and a sweet buck. I also like the side profile pic with the mountain in background. Try that one in black and white.

 

[HunterGatherer]

Congrats on a sweet buck! It would be cool to see a regular photo that isn’t a fish eye type angle. From the photos you posted it’s difficult to actually see what he is.

Thanks. They are just normal photos. I think I used portrait mode on my iPhone, which just blurs the background by changing the depth of field somewhat but it doesn’t distort the image at all. He looks like the photos in real life ….

 

[HunterGatherer]

Forgot to mention, on the last trip out I stopped at the hit site where he was standing when I shot. I was able to find the bullet under the snow. It was pretty cool- there was a trail of hair and some blood spray on top of the snow and then a big hole where the bullet impacted …

 

[huntnful]

Holy Mass!!! Such a beautiful buck! How’d he look in the previous year/years you were aware of him?

 

[HunterGatherer]

Holy Mass!!! Such a beautiful buck! How’d he look in the previous year/years you were aware of him?

The only other time I laid eyes on him was in 2021. I could tell he was probably about 4-5 at the time and already had really good mass but I didn’t get good pics of him. I picked up a big shed very close to where I killed him, in 2018 that looks like his daddy. Exo pack for scale. It measures 104 4/8…


The burrs are almost identical, curve of the beam and the mass.

 

[huntnful]

The only other time I laid eyes on him was in 2021. I could tell he was probably about 4-5 at the time and already had really good mass but I didn’t get good pics of him. I picked up a big shed very close to where I killed him, in 2018 that looks like his daddy. Exo pack for scale. It measures 104 4/8…
View attachment 961880

The burrs are almost identical, curve of the beam and the mass.

The single antler alone was 104”?! That’s unreal man.

 

[MuleyFever]

Absolutely spectacular, score means nothing.

Shortened that sentence for you.

Great buck.

 

[crowlja]

Nice! Congrats man! Sorry, I couldn't finish reading this in 1 session, ill have to finish reading it later. May take several reading sessions