Roosevelt Elk and the Rise of Behemoth Bulls

It was early August 2002 when my phone rang. “You might want to check out the big bull that was just killed near you,” a friend of a friend of a friend told me. I ignored it.

Fifteen minutes later another call came, followed by another, then two more within the next few hours. All were from different people, none of whom I knew. They all claimed to have gotten my number from mutual friends. Everyone said the same thing about the big bull. None of them had actually seen it.

Then a close friend called, someone I trusted. He told me he just saw the massive Roosevelt elk, and it was giant. I get calls, texts, and emails all the time about big animals killed near my home from folks asking me to write magazine articles about them. Nearly all are false leads, so rarely do I follow up. I’ve chased too many leads on 600-pound bears that were no more than 200 pounds, Columbia blacktails said to be 160 inches that barely carried 130 inches of antler, and 400-inch elk that were maybe 320 inches. Maybe.

Once in a while, however, a legitimate call comes through, one that’s worth checking out. This Roosevelt elk was one of them. I was given the name and number of the hunter who took the bull less than an hour from my home in western Oregon.

Giant Down

The hunter was Scott Ballard, a high school shop teacher and part-time butcher serving the local communities around Monroe, Ore.

“You have to come see this thing’s hindquarters,” was the first thing Ballard told me on the phone. “The bull is quartered and in my walk-in cooler.”

The quarters, ribs, and neck were still on the bone, and along with the backstraps, they tipped the scales to over 700 pounds. That was the first thing Ballard showed me when I met with him at his house later that morning. To this day they are the most impressive hindquarters and backstraps I’ve seen on any elk. I wanted to see the rack!

Figuring the cape and rack would be neatly coiled in the corner of the chiller, I failed to see it.

“Oh, it’s out back,” Ballard said when I asked to see it. We walked out the back of his shop and I still failed to notice it. “It’s over there, behind that pile of wood,” Ballard said, pointing.

Humble Hunting

Tossed on the ground were the head and a partial cape. Much of the cape, along with some briars and tall grass, covered the rack. I had to move things around to get an idea of how big it was. I grabbed a tine and tried swinging the skull around but couldn’t budge it. I lifted the hide off the rack, moved some brush and we pulled the head into the lawn. The rack was white with bloody spots. The bull was in full velvet when Ballard shot it. Actually, the bull was just beginning to strip its velvet shortly before it met its end. When I finally wrapped my hands around the main beam, I knew this bull was something special.

Not once did Ballard ask how big I thought the bull was or if I believed it would make the books. He kept talking about how much great eating meat his family was going to have. He was excited and I respected that. A Roosevelt elk taken in August is a rarity and it’s some of the best eating big-game meat on the planet. My wife, Tiffany, once held a tag similar to Ballard’s, but in another area of western Oregon. These are depredation permits meant to thin elk herds causing damage on farm crops, orchards, and tree farms. Tiffany got a nice 6-point in full velvet and that bull was the best eating we’d ever had.

This was Ballard’s first elk. The herd had been living on Finley Wildlife Refuge, a place that’s historically renowned for waterfowl, not elk. In the 1950s and ’60s my dad and granddad hunted the edges of Finley Refuge for waterfowl. There were no elk then and if you’d have told them elk would one day live there—let alone a world-record bull would come from it—they’d have thought you were a bit off-kilter.

“The elk have been feeding in a fruit orchard, moving across a field and bedding on a wooded hillside,” Ballard told me. “I set up a ground blind in hopes of catching them as they moved across the field.”

Pragmatic Approach

Ballard didn’t have a rangefinder. Instead, he paced off the distance from the blind into the field. At 100 yards, he made a little pile of straw. He did the same at 200 yards, then 300, all the way out to 500 yards. It proved to be a smart move.

Ballard hunted most mornings since the season opened on Aug. 1, but the elk eluded him. Four bulls had been hanging out together much of the summer. Those were what Ballard was looking for. Then, one Sunday morning before heading to church, Ballard’s timing was right. The bulls fed on the edge of the field, then popped into the open more than 600 yards away. All the bulls were big, but one in particular stood out.

“Two bulls started fighting right in the middle of the field,” Ballard told me. “The big bull held back in the brush and raked its antlers. I didn’t think it was ever going to come out so I got ready to shoot one of the closer bulls that was now in range. That’s when my cousin, Randy, tapped me on the shoulder and said the big bull was coming out.”
Ballard put his safety back on and re-focused on the big bull in hopes it would move closer. It did. First at 600 yards, then 500, then 450.

“When it stopped at 450 yards and turned broadside, it looked giant in my scope,” Ballard recalled. He then made a perfect shot with a .30-06 and the Barnes X bullet did its job.

Boone and Crockett Club

After the required drying period I returned to Ballard’s house along with longtime friend and Boone and Crockett Club official scorer, the now late Glenn Abbott. The existing world record Roosevelt elk at the time scored 396 ⅝ points. That was a 9x10 bull taken by Karl Minor in 1997 near Campbell River, British Columbia.

When Abbott tallied the measurements of Ballard’s 9x10 rack, the official score was 404 6⁄8 points, the first-ever Roosevelt elk to eclipse the 400-inch mark. I was the attester and was honored to sign my name on the official score sheet. Ballard’s bull is mounted life-size and now on display in the Cabela’s store in Springfield, Ore. It’s worth the stop.

Rise of the Behemoth Bulls

The story doesn’t end there. In November of the same year, Ballard’s cousin, Randy Sherman, who was with Ballard when he shot his world record bull, held an over-the-counter Roosevelt bull tag for the Coast Range. The southwest section of Finley Refuge extends into the Coast Range, a dense habitat known for hiding Roosevelt elk.

Sherman went out to simply kill a bull, any bull. He found one browsing in thick brush on a hillside. He could only see one tine because the bull’s head was covered by brush, but part of the bull’s body was exposed. Sherman had a shot between Douglas fir tree limbs and bushy foliage and hit the mark. He thought he’d shot a small bull, but when he walked up to it, he found the second-largest bull that had been with Ballard’s bull when he shot his. Sherman’s bull was massive, and scored in the top 10 all-time in the Boone and Crockett Club records.

Not long after Ballard broke the world record for Roosevelt elk, I was bear hunting in northern California. I was with noted houndsman Kenny Gavin, a man who had killed more bears than anyone I’d ever met. He handled bear depredation problems for timber companies who were suffering excessive tree damage. I hunted with Gavin a number of times and some of the bull elk we saw in Humboldt and Trinity counties left me in awe. We saw bulls very near, if not bigger than, the Ballard bull.

“I bet there’s a world-record bull in these hills,” I told Gavin one morning as we watched a beast of a bull browsing in a logged unit. He agreed, claiming he’d seen bigger bulls than the one we were looking at.

Opportunities

As hunting opportunities increased in that part of California, big Roosevelts from Humboldt, Trinity and Del Norte counties started appearing in the record books. Those numbers haven’t slowed down.

In February of this year the Boone and Crockett Club records department received a Roosevelt elk entry which if confirmed by a panel of judges will become the new world record. The bull was shot by Timothy Carpenter in Humboldt County on Sept. 21, 2023. A preliminary score of Carpenter’s bull stretched the tape to an amazing 439 ⅞ points, far exceeding the previous world record of 419 6⁄8 taken in 2015 by Rick Bailey in British Columbia. Carpenter has multiple Roosevelt elk in the record books, including the current archery world record he shot in 2011 that scored a mind-boggling 398 ⅛.

Roosevelt elk are all scored as typical; there is no non-typical category in the Boone and Crockett Club Records Book. This is because they often grow irregular crown points near or above the G4, or dagger point. These points are measured separately and added into the total score. Abnormal points below the G4 are deducted. Tule elk are also measured in this way; Rocky Mountain elk have two categories — typical and non-typical.

One-in-a-Million

As many do-it-yourself elk hunters know, rarely do you target a world-class bull and kill it. Usually record-book bulls are killed by chance, a matter of being in the right place at the right time and connecting on the shot.

During my final years of hosting TV shows I got a call from good friend and noted Roosevelt elk guide Jody Smith. “I just saw two bulls and one is going to be pushing 400 inches,” Smith told me on the phone.

It was late July and I held a landowner depredation tag where Smith saw the bulls. The next day I joined him. We scoured the land but couldn’t find the bulls. We found tracks and they were jaw-dropping. The season opened on Aug. 1 and Smith was tied up guiding salmon fishing clients. I knew the area; it was small, no more than 500 acres, so cameraman Travis Ralls and I hunted it.

We hit it hard, but the first few days we only saw Columbia blacktails in the hills of Oregon’s Coast Range. The next day we hiked up and over a ridge. The wind was perfect, so I started calling. Cow calls followed by a bugle carried across the canyon. Minutes later one of the biggest bulls I’d ever seen materialized out of the timber.

“Don’t shoot the heavy-racked one with thick royals, that’s the small one!” was what was going through my mind, the last words of advice Smith gave me. This bull fit the description. Inside 300 yards, the shot would have been simple, but we waited and waited and waited for the bigger bull to show up. It never did. When the bull we’d been watching turned and started heading away, I called but it didn’t stop. I called louder and more frequently, but no other bulls appeared.

That night we showed Smith the footage and he confirmed it was the smaller of the two bulls. We estimated it could go 380 inches.

“The other one is a lot bigger; wider with longer fronts and royals,” Smith reconfirmed. We hunted the next two days and didn’t see an elk. Ralls and I had to hit the road filming other hunts. I returned multiple times throughout the long season but the elk never returned to the area. Trail cameras were scattered on prime trails and logging roads and they didn’t catch a single elk. The elk left the property and didn’t come back. I doubt anyone killed that bull — someone would have heard about it.

“Every year I get a giant bull on trail camera,” Smith shared. “I never see them in person or in daylight. They’re just passing through, then they’re gone. We hunt all around them the entire archery season and both rifle seasons but never see them. These big, old bulls live in thick, dense stuff and it’s easy for them to hide.”

Smith hunts land surrounding Oregon’s Elliott National Forest. This area is as rugged as any part of the Rocky Mountains I’ve hunted in and the dense cover reminds me of the Sumatran rainforest. World-class bulls live and die in such habitats, never being seen by a human.

Monster Elk Near Home

Over the past decade, I’ve received multiple calls about big Roosevelt bulls being killed near my home. While most of them pan out to be true, almost all of the hunters don’t want to be interviewed or have their pictures shown with the bulls.

One winter I was doing a seminar on hunting Roosevelt elk at the sportsmen’s show in Portland, Ore. Afterwards, a man approached me, thanking me for the insightful details. We shook hands and parted ways. He attended the next year and the next, and each time commended me on the thoroughness of my seminars. The last time, we chatted. I asked the man if he got his ‘Roosy’ that season.

“Yep, I did, Scott, thanks for asking,” he smiled.

We talked more. The man was quiet, humble and a true gentleman. I came to find out it was his 26th straight Roosevelt bull he’d killed with a bow. He showed me pictures of some absolute giants he’d taken, all on public land in the Coast Range and all by himself. He asked to remain nameless. He’s the man who should have been delivering the seminars, not me.

Serious Roosevelt elk hunters can be a secretive bunch. They’re hard-working, scout all summer long, and dedicate all their time off work to chasing elk during hunting season. In recent years some giant bulls have been taken by archery hunters very near Interstate 5, less than 15 minutes from Eugene, Ore. One bull that scored close to 380 inches was shot within sight of one of my favorite duck hunting spots, smack on the valley floor, complete with 18 wheelers rumbling up and down the interstate. I saw pictures of that bull and actually guessed it to exceed 380 inches.

Nineteen years ago I was invited to hunt black bears on Quinault Indian Nation land. I was the first non-tribal member to hunt the land in more than 150 years. I was more than honored and shot some giant bears over the next few years. I also laid eyes on some absolute giant Roosevelt elk. I was very aware of the history of these elk on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula as well as in and around the Olympic National Forest and the park. They were the biggest-bodied, heaviest-racked Roosevelt elk I’d ever seen. I bet there’s a world-record rack laying in someone’s backyard on the tribal land where providing meat for the family is the priority, not entering an elk in the record book.

Adaptable Animals

One thing that most amazes me about Roosevelt elk is their ability to expand their range and adapt to new habitats, and it seems more bulls are simply growing bigger in conjunction with this expansion. Where I grew up hunting Columbia black-tailed deer in the western foothills of the Cascades Range, there were never any elk. Then, in the late 1980s they started trickling in. The hunting for these elk peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, many herds have moved even further to the west. They made their way down into river drainages meandering through Oregon’s Willamette Valley, spread across rolling hills studded in oak trees and now thrive in grassy agricultural fields fringed in cover on both sides of Interstate 5. Crossing a major freeway is nothing to them.

Roosevelt elk are some of the most adaptable big-game animals I’ve seen. They’re strong, can overcome obstacles and with little effort, cover many miles. But there are limits, even for our biggest-bodied elk in North America. Four years ago this September, much of the Roosevelt elk’s range in the Cascades and Coast Range of Northern California, Oregon and Washington was devastated by massive wildfires. Multiple herds were reportedly engulfed in flames in the big Holiday Fire near my home that scorched more than 173,000 acres. Many herds fled and haven’t returned to the areas that burned extra-hot, and I doubt they will, not in my lifetime.

But the elk on the fringes of many burned areas are bouncing back. Last fall I saw multiple elk herds returning to areas where the burns were less severe. Here, food is flourishing and cover, though sparse in areas, is ample enough to hide even these big creatures.

Having spent most of my life in Roosevelt elk country, I know the frequency with which big bulls are being taken by archery and rifle hunters is growing. Just three seasons ago an archer hunting not far from my home arrowed a 391 6⁄8-inch bull, Oregon’s second-biggest Roosevelt to go into an official record book. And every season I hear of and see more and more giant bulls being taken.

Just like the blacktail deer that thrive in this brushy habitat of the Pacific Northwest, Roosevelt elk can be ghosts in the forest. Watch a herd of 50 animals pass within 30 yards and not make a sound and you’ll be dumbfounded. Set eyes on just one monster bull and you’ll instantly understand their allure. Most who spend a lifetime chasing them fall short of finding a truly big bull. Such is the life of most Roosevelt elk hunters. But all it takes is one brief moment of being in the right place at the right time and life changes.

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