They raced across the water and ascended into tawny meadows. A man led his horse, yelling, “He’s gonna go like a son of a bitch!” Many of the hunters headed for Flat Creek, a stream running through hills. The cars sped off, dust and headlights creating eerie weather. Early the next morning, police officers began escorting vehicles to the east end of town, where the road turned to dirt. He told his friends that he had run more than seven hundred miles in the past nine months to prepare for antler season.Īs night approached, people drank beer and prepared to sleep in their cars. Nearby, a coed group from Kansas was huddled around a pickup truck, where a twenty-seven-year-old Pfizer employee was holding court. That afternoon, workers from a cheese-processing plant in Utah played with a spotting scope-a device that can detect sheds from hundreds of yards away. Some shed hunters use trained dogs others rely on expensive optics. Amid thick deadfall in the high country, every root and bleached cow femur can resemble an antler. But many shed hunters are also proud hunters, and the physical demands of the two sports are similar: both can require endurance in rough, mountainous terrain. Nearly all of them were men, a good number of whom were dressed in camouflage-an unnecessary choice, given that antlers don’t run. Many of them were locals, while others had come from Utah and Idaho, New York and Wisconsin. They drove trucks with window stickers that said “ RISE AND SHED” and “ SHED LIFE” some hauled horse trailers. On April 30, 2021, shed hunters began arriving in southwest Jackson, at the Teton County Fairgrounds, a designated waiting area twenty-five minutes from where the hunt would take place. The derby’s start has since been amended to 6 A. It used to begin at midnight, but in 2015 a shed hunter on horseback tried to cross a river and was swept away. The May hunt is feverish, and occasionally dangerous. “You get to put your hands on something no one else has ever touched,” a shed hunter from Minnesota told me. Each year, on the first of May, those lands open to shed hunters.
But though the elk may eat the refuge’s alfalfa, they don’t have much use for arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries, so they frequently wander onto adjacent public lands, which are managed by the U.S. On the National Elk Refuge, only the staff and local Boy Scouts are permitted to collect antlers, which are sold in an annual auction. (A large shed antler might weigh ten pounds.) Collectors are known to pay upward of fifteen hundred dollars for a particularly desirable pair of antlers, and tens of thousands of dollars for deadheads-skulls with the antlers still attached.
The bones are valuable: last summer, top-grade elk antler sold for sixteen dollars a pound. The wounds heal, regrowth begins, and people start searching for the antlers that have been shed. In the spring, the bones are cast off, leaving behind bloody pedicles. “It’s an honest advertisement.” When bulls are done breeding, their testosterone levels fall, and so do their antlers. “There’s a relation between antler size and sperm counts,” Matthew Metz, a wildlife biologist and research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, told me. The velvet is filled with blood vessels, so the process leaves a gory mess blood stains the hard antlers, and sap, dirt, and tree bark color them further.Īround September, mating season begins, and bulls use their antlers to spar with one another when vying for breeding rights with cows. At the end of the summer, the antlers ossify, and elk scrape the velvet off on trees. During this period, the antlers are soft, cartilaginous, and covered in fine hair-known as “velvet”-and they contain reproducing stem cells. Adult male elk, or bulls, grow their antlers between April and August. Unlike horns, which are permanently attached to an animal’s head, antlers regenerate annually. The animals eat government-funded alfalfa pellets, living in a carefully managed symbiosis with a town that presents itself as a frontier outpost, and which has a median home price of three million dollars. Most of the antlers come from the National Elk Refuge, an expanse of hills and meadows on the outskirts of Jackson where roughly eight thousand elk spend the winter. Jackson’s trademark is a town square with four archways each arch was made from some fourteen thousand pounds of antler. A large arch of intertwined elk antlers greets passengers as they arrive at the local airport, and, in town, antler chandeliers hang from tall ceilings at a high-end furniture store. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some antlers are easy to find.
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