My good friend John Gisi bought the Arizona Commisioners tag for Mule Deer in 2009. This tag is good for one 365 season starting on Aug 15th. 2009 and running until Aug 14th 2010. After much effort by many others, John had to yet to kill a buck when the Spring of 2010 rolled around. He gave us a call and a plan was formed.
I started scouting around the 4th week of June. The Strip was as green as I can ever remember seeing it and the monsoons had not even started yet. As I began to refind old bucks and discover new, one thing was clear, antler growth was un-freakin-believable! I was joined by Bryon around July 15th and by then I had already seen gobs of bucks over 200" including several over 220" The giant we knew as the "Fifty Incher" (buck pictured on the title of this blog) was one of two bucks that had are close attention. We figured "Fifty" to be over 40"wide and well over 230" gross. We also had a menagerie of backup bucks that were between 220" and 230" when John arrived to start hunting on August 1st. Sounds hard to believe I know but 2010 will go down in history as one of the best ever seasons on the Arizona Strip.
Aug 1st-Let the troubles begin. Right before we commenced hunting, things began to unravel. An enormous amount of non-stop monsoon storms racked the Strip daily. This threw most of our bucks patterns into chaos. Our two top bucks changed country and no amount of effort was going to turn them up. They had simply retreated into unhuntable, unglassable, dog hair thick country. Combine this with the fact that Strip bucks are very elusive by nature and don't allow the luxury of being able to find them at will, and we were quickly running out of time. We kept spreading out and looking, as well as starting to keep tabs on a few of our backup bucks. Time wore on and after 10+ days and only a few days remaining in the season, we decided it was time to shoot something.
On Day 12 we caught a break and when we spotted one of our best back-up bucks. We immediately seized the the moment as John and I made a long stalk and got in position. As is so common on the Strip, the buck and his buddies had retreated into a dark, nasty thicket of cedars to bed for the day. We posted up on the only marginal vantage point available and hunkered down underneath a tree. We had waited for several hot hours for something to move when Bryon and Ben made an awesome spot on John's buck from well over 3 miles away. They informed us that the bucks were exiting the thicket on the backside. We grabbed our gear and cut right through the bedding thicket going straight at the bucks. As we neared the edge we stopped and and started watching for anything to move. We kept slowly closing ground and finally a buck moved into view. It was not the big buck. We stayed put, eventually making one more small move and there he was feeding in a small opening between two trees. John readied himself on a tripod in the standing position and after watching the buck for an extra second or two to make sure he was the right one, John hammered him.
We were all very pleased to have harvested this buck after taking the hunt down to the wire. With only one day left in his 365 day season Johns awesome buck grossed 241". His frame was a tad over 210" with over 30 inches of trash. He measured over 23 inches of mass per side and had an outside spread of over 34" inches.
A huge thanks go out to John for his many generous contributions to Arizona wildlife. Without the purchase of these types of tags there would not be the funds available to manage and improve so many of the delicate areas these bucks call home. Thanks to Bryon Goswick and Ben Wells and everyone else involved for all the dedicated hard work.
