Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting The Legend of Giant Mule Deer

You're absolutely correct that the general units have every bit as big of deer as the hard draws, but you're often hurrying towards a deer during a general season once you spot it before the guy on the next ridge sees it too, and takes a 1000 yard shot at it.
The general seasons get stupid crowded in the good areas. Even the high country, miles off the road are often crawling with hunters. I hunt the transition areas 1-2 miles from the roads, where the road hunters can't see but nowhere near in as fas as the hikers go. It seems to be the best bang for your buck, so to speak, that I have found.

The deer draw tags are nice to avoid the crowds...not necessarily to find the bigger deer.

Yep, I'm in this deep, gonna wait for a great tag... never gonna be in this position again so I'll wait it out.

I remember reading about him as a kid, in fact I met him at a sportsmans show back in the late 70's or early 80's maybe. Anyway, I went up to his display and bought his book and had him sign it. Its says, To Frank "Good luck hunting" Kirt Darner. Guess it takes more than good luck to kill all those big bucks Its a pretty good book though for when it was written.

Don't kid yourself, there are still big deer out there. I shot this one on the way to the range...

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Could you give us some more details on this hunt shrapnel?

What does that buck score,Shrapnel?

I believe that Darner worked for the Dept of Wildlife in CO, or in some State capacity, and was always in the field. He did know a lot about big mule deer because he was around them every day. The guy I hunted in Sonora, MX with actually was involved in the Darner investigations, actively, and he told me all about it. I had been a big Darner believer and was pretty stunned actually. Turns out Darner either shot most all of those big bucks out of season, or it was even proven he bought some of those antlers from very old timers that killed monster bucks back in the 30's and '40's when there were virtually no pictures. As luck would have it there was an old pic or two of some massive bucks killed by these old timers that Darner wound up with, mounted on new capes, and claimed he killed them. He was stripped of all of his numerous B&C entries because of his poaching and lying. His desire for fame and fortune got the best of him.

rosco1, yes his name was Rich L. I had those books by Darner too. There were some huge bucks in there that I couldn't quit thinking about. Too bad the guy was a fraud.

I remember about 15 years back, Rich L. started dropping little pieces about Darner every month or so. There was a thread over on monstermuleys called “The Real Kirt Darner” or “The Kirt Darner I Know” or something like that.

In each little “chapter” there was always some insinuation that he had Darner red-handed, but then he’d leave you hanging for the next little morsel.

Increased website traffic for Rich greatly, I’m sure.

Then it all just stopped. There was no smoking gun. I think Darner made for a good punching bag.

Rich forgot more about Darner and the investigation than you will ever know. He wasn't guessing.

I don't have to answer to you about anything, and I don't care whether you believe it or not. Once again, you're guessing, Rich isn't.

My dealings with Darner
by Rich LaRocco
President, Hunts.Net
Many of you might know that I wrote both of Kirt Darner's books in the early '80s. Some of you also might know that shortly afterward evidence came into my hands that he had not killed one of his Boone and Crockett mule deer, and I turned that evidence over to Jack Reneau of the Boone and Crockett Club, which later ruled against Darner.

This is a long and sorry story, and I've never written it down until now though I've been happy to share it with people who have asked.

I first found out about Darner when I was senior editor at Outdoor Life Magazine (yes, I worked in Manhattan), and I was assigned to edit an article that my friend Jim Zumbo had written about the man. Darner was supposedly the most successful trophy mule deer hunter of all time and had seven bucks in the Boone and Crockett Club's record book.
I also found an article that been written by Doug Knight in Field and Stream magazine in the late '60s or early '70s. The article featured a hunt that Knight had enjoyed with Darner and another young friend in a New Mexico wilderness area, where Knight reported seeing some great bucks and where Darner and his friend both killed big deer.

Later, I left New York to return to the wild and free and sunny West and settled in Cache Valley, Utah. Clair Conley, editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life, asked me to stay with the magazine as Western field editor. I turned him down because the Western field editor of the time was my friend Dwight Schuh, who is now editor of Bowhunting Magazine. Clair said he was letting Dwight go, whether I took the job or not, and so I reluctantly agreed. If I had to make that decision over again, I would have turned down the job a second time, but sometimes in life you learn the hard way, and when you're hardheaded, that's how you tend to learn all your big lessons.

And that is the case with the Darner story

In 1982 I settled my family in Wellsville, Utah, an ideal location for my outdoor writing and editing career because it was right in the middle of some of the finest fishing and hunting country in America. Within two hours I could be hunting in Wyoming or Idaho and within a day's drive I could be fishing or hunting anywhere from California to Nebraska or Montana to New Mexico. And I took the opportunity to see the country, too, fishing or hunting in many locations and writing articles and taking photographs for Outdoor Life and several other outdoor magazines.
Not long after returning to Utah I received an assignment to write a piece on Kirt Darner for North American Hunter magazine, published by the North American Hunting Club. I phoned Darner in Montrose, Colorado, and arranged an interview. He was knowledgeable and engaging. He was also willing to help me accomplish some of my hunting goals and talked about arranging for me to bowhunt elk with Wayne Carlton, a friend of his who had been having great fortune calling in elk with a unique method he had discovered.

Darner was in his early 40s and had recently married for the second time. His wife, Paula, seemed genuinely interested in hunting, too, and it was obvious they enjoyed spending time together in the outdoors.

My article dealt mainly with Darner's advice to other hunters who were seeking a trophy-class mule deer. I had been seeing some great bucks while bowhunting in Utah and had spent several years trying to put a bow kill on the all-time Boone and Crockett list. Each year I was seeing one to three bucks that I thought would go into the B&C book, which at the time required a net score of at least 195. So it seemed logical to me that if a guy hunted with a rifle long enough and smart enough, he could take a B&C class buck occasionally. Darner had killed seven B&C bucks though if I recall some of them had been taken when the minimum was still 190.
That fall Darner arranged for me to bow hunt elk with Wayne Carlton, originally from Florida. Wayne had been seeing a tremendous bull elk in a wilderness area and had relocated the bull shortly before the season. He thought that bull would score close to world record size, which was in the 380s at the time. We were planning to concentrate on that bull alone. Unfortunately Wayne's mother became severely ill in September. By the time of the hunt Wayne had flown to Florida to be with her, so Darner arranged for my hunting partner and me to hunt with a Texan who had moved to Montrose and owned a restaurant in town.

My hunting partner, broadhead and Tree Sling inventor Jeff Anderson of New Jersey, soon learned that Archie knew the area we were hunting near Dolores but knew little about bowhunting or calling. Fortunately, Larry D. Jones of Oregon, had given me one of his prototype metal-reed elk bugles, and so we decided we would try that. I had killed my first elk the previous bow season when Schuh used this call to lure a 5x5 within 28 yards of me at an elevation of almost 13,000 feet in northern Colorado, and he called in six or seven other bulls that season.

It didn't take us long to realize that our chances of taking a big bull would be low because the area was well-roaded, and most bulls were probably having a hard time surviving more than two or three years. So when the guide and I called a four-point bull within a range of 10 or 15 yards, I sent an arrow through his lungs. After packing the meat out, we spent several days trying to call in a bull for Jeff. We had some action, but when our guide mistook the droppings and odors left by domestic sheep for elk sign, we were getting a mite frustrated.
With just a couple of days left in the hunt Wayne arrived. A charming guy with a southern accent and a constant smile, he immediately lifted our spirits. He demonstrated his calling technique, which he had learned on his own, using a mouth diaphragm turkey call to bugle elk. We had several bulls, including a 6x6, approach within 70 or 80 yards but couldn't get Jeff the shot he wanted.

Later that year I wrote the first article about using a diaphragm call to bugle elk, basing it on interviews with Wayne. The article's publication in Outdoor Life sent Wayne into a new career path. He sold his pest control business and set up shop as a wholesaler of hunting accessories, and he later became a popular seminar speaker and eventually began producing hunting videos, and now he hosts a TV show for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

After the hunt we returned to Montrose, where Darner showed us Polaroid photographs of himself and his wife posing with a gigantic non-typical mule deer with antlers that were still covered with velvet.
"While you guys were elk hunting," Darner said, "Paula and I were hunting this buck in Wyoming. He scores over 280 Boone and Crockett points."
And then he proceeded to tell us a detailed story of how he and Paula had outsmarted this wily old buck high above timberline in a roadless portion of Region H in Wyoming.
"You know," he said, "I think I have enough stories and pictures to make a really interesting book about trophy mule deer hunting. I've always liked your writing style. Would you be interested in writing it for me?"
Indeed I was. And so we worked out a deal where I would interview him and write, "How to Find Giant Bucks" by Kirt Darner as told to Rich LaRocco. He would publish the book himself and would pay me $1.50 for each copy sold.

Eventually I signed a contract that gave Darner the copyright to anything I might write in connection with the book, and my name would not appear on the cover, only in a bio inside. I'm glad now that I didn't have such a big ego that I demanded my name on the cover.

And so began a series of interviews I did with Darner in his home, surrounded by all his rifles and trophies. I would drive down to Montrose and spend a couple of days each time, taking voluminous notes and setting up photographs that would be used to illustrate the book.

Throughout the interviews I asked Darner several times if there had been anything illegal or unethical about any of the deer he had taken. He consistently replied that he had taken each buck fairly and squarely and had never broken any laws in doing so. He said his father, unlike many hunters of the time, was a stickler for obeying the game laws.
"My dad was the same way," I said. "Some of my friends had dads and brothers who would party hunt and even sometimes hunt after season or shoot after hours, but my dad was a straight arrow. Still, I didn't start off legally and ethically. A friend and I shot our first deer with .22s during a rabbit hunt in the winter when we were 14 and 15 years old. I haven't done anything like that since, but didn't you ever even one time bend a game law in taking any of your deer?"

"Absolutely not," Darner replied and then he intimated that perhaps he should not associate himself with me for having shot that doe as a youngster.

At a conference that year I mentioned my work to fellow outdoor writer Judd Cooney, a former conservation officer in Colorado, and he warned me against writing the book.

"You need to stay away from Darner," he said. "He has a reputation of being a poacher."
"Is there any evidence against him?" I asked.

"I don't have any," Judd replied. "But I have a friend who does."

"If that's the case, I need to talk with him," I said. "What's his name?"

"I can't give it to you," Judd said.

"Well, if Darner truly is a poacher, I need to know," I said. "Have him call me. I don't need to quote him or anything, but if there's anything solid against Darner, I will disassociate myself from him. I've asked him several times if there's anything fishy about any of his deer, and he's always said he hasn't even bent the rules to take any of them. He says he has critics who are jealous and just can't believe a hunter can be good enough to kill as many big deer as he has taken. Plus his stories about each deer are consistent each time he repeats them."

I never heard from Cooney's friend and went ahead with my work on the book. Nowadays I would probably heed Judd's advice. I used to believe a man is innocent until proved guilty. Now I realize that this principle applies only in a court of law. When it comes to your reputation or your family's financial or physical safety, it's wise to assume guilt when there's any reasonable cause to believe so. I also believe that where there's smoke, there's fire. Now, 24 years after I smelled the first smoke, I've come to believe that there wasn't just fire but a major conflagration.

One day I asked Kirt why he didn't have more field pictures of himself with bucks he had killed. "I usually hunt alone," he replied. "And I pack really light, usually just carrying what I need in my pockets, and I just don't have room for a camera. I've never used a self-timer and frankly never thought about taking photos."One reason I took him at his word is that when I killed my first mature buck, I failed to take a photograph of it even though I had a Minolta SRT-101 in camp. That buck was extraordinarily large in body size. Leonard Lee Rue wrote in one of his books about two California muleys that each weighed more than 400 pounds, and another source claims the weight record is 385 pounds field-dressed. Neither of my two brothers nor I would be surprised if my buck came close to those figures, and yet I still didn't think about getting a picture after we hauled the buck out of the mountains. I regret that oversight, but even if I had a photo I'm sure that some would call it a hoax. In any case, if I didn't take a picture of such an unusually big deer, then I could understand why Darner didn't make a habit of taking field pictures, either.

Darner said he would start carrying a camera equipped with a self-timer to allay suspicions about his success. Indeed before the book was finished, autumn had arrived, and he supplied to the publisher photos of big deer he claimed to have harvested in Utah and Colorado. Those of you who have read "How to Find Giant Bucks" might remember a couple of those photos. I never saw those pictures until the book was off the press, and it was obvious that both deer were photographed in the same place in front of the same rock. Darner claimed that he transported the deer to the same spot for photographs and even took me to that location, which was near Montrose.

After the book was published I started hearing many rumors and theories about Darner. I felt it was my duty to follow up on these rumors, and invariably they led nowhere. Most critics would say that no single person could ever take as many record-class bucks in a lifetime as Darner claimed to have done because big muleys are so rare and so difficult to hunt. The rumors seemed to spring from envy as much as from incredulity. I began to think that killing more than two or three record-class mule deer in a lifetime would ruin the credibility of any hunter. Even today, my best proof that I'm not a poacher is that I don't have a Boone and Crockett muley to my credit. If and when I finally kill one, I fear that some hunters will say I broke the law to do it. One especially troubling case involved a sheriff's deputy in Delta County, Colorado. The deputy had written a letter to Outdoor Life, contending that Darner was well-known as a poacher and that he had been charged with grand theft of an automobile.

By then I was editing Darner's second book, "Hunting the Rockies," a compilation of stories by Darner and acquaintances of his. During one of my trips to Montrose, I stopped in Delta to talk with the deputy. The county sheriff wouldn't allow me to interview him, taking a copy of the letter sent to Outdoor Life and promising that he would respond after looking into the matter. A few weeks later I received a letter from the sheriff, who said the deputy had been suspended because there was very little truth in the letter he had written. He said the deputy had no proof that Darner was a poacher and that Kirt had not been charged with stealing a car. A hunter who was angry that Darner had leased a ranch parked a truck to block access through a gate to the property. Kirt had moved the truck a few yards away from the gate, angering the hunter and the deputy.Another interesting claim came my way during an elk bowhunting trip in the Washakie Wilderness east of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. I called in and killed a six-point bull after a marathon hunt, and after returning to base camp, the outfitter told me that one of his hunters had told him he had proof that Darner had taken a deer illegally."If that's the case," I said, "I need the facts.

"The outfitter said that the hunter was in a spike camp but would be coming into the main camp in a day or two. When he returned to main camp one day, I immediately sought him out."Yup, I have proof that Darner is a poacher," he said. "That big Wyoming deer was supposedly shot after Sept. 10. I was hunting in Wyoming then, and all the bucks we saw were totally out of velvet. He had to have shot that buck before the season.

""Well, that's an interesting theory," I said.

"But I saw a 36-inch non-typical in full velvet on Sept. 17 in Region G in Wyoming, and one of my friends shot it the next day, and it was still in full velvet."

So much for that proof.After the second book was published, my friend Kim Bonnett, a man whom I respect and admire and an accomplished hunter in his own right, told me that he had major doubts about a 36-inch buck Darner supposedly shot in Utah. Even though Kim and his wife had developed a close friendship with the Darners, he was cutting off contact with him. Kim had invited Kirt to hunt a ranch he had leased in a remote section of central Utah. During a pre-season scouting trip, both men saw a gigantic non-typical mule deer, and Darner told Bonnett that he would be holding out for that deer. Darner showed up to hunt the deer and left the ranch shortly afterward, but not before one of Kim's customers saw Darner with the buck, which he supposedly had killed the previous day.

The hunter said the deer appeared to have been dead much longer than a day.I already had interviewed Darner about this hunt and had written and sold an article about it. That piece was published in Petersen's Hunting Magazine. In it Darner had said his wife, Paula, also shot at an exceptional typical muley on the ranch. Bonnett said that he hadn't given Paula permission to hunt. He also said that nobody on the ranch had heard either of the Darners shoot. He also said that one of the Darners had entered a big typical in the Sunset Sporting Goods big buck contest in Price, Utah, and he wondered whether Paula or Kirt had shot that animal elsewhere. Kim was particularly offended by a paragraph in the article that criticized his guides for driving down a ridge before dark on opening morning, while the Darners were in position close to the prime deer area.I called Darner about my conversation with Kim, and he said that he stood by his story and asked whether I had ever failed to hear somebody in my hunting camp shoot at a deer.

"Yes, indeed," I said.

(Incidentally, just three years ago while hunting with my friend Chuck Johnson, I shot an elk as I was walking just 50 yards ahead of Chuck on a bare hilltop in a brisk winter wind, and he didn't hear my .300 Magnum bark twice.) Darner said there obviously had been a miscommunication about Paula's permission to hunt. He also had an explanation about the Sunset contest, but I don't recall it.As for the big non-typical buck's appearance, Darner said the eyes of a deer shrivel up quickly in the dry, hot air of southeastern Utah, and I knew that to be the case. "I have some pictures of us packing out that deer on Kim's lease," he said.

"It's not like I killed a big buck somewhere else and packed it down onto the ranch. That wouldn't make any sense anyway."

It was fall at the time, and I didn't have time to follow up on the Sunset story. Darner sent me some pictures from that hunt along with photos of some of his other recent hunts, including pictures of hunters with trophy deer taken on his own leases in Colorado. I finally had a chance to study the photos from Bonnett's lease and realized that the deer Darner claimed to have killed on opening day appeared to have been dead much longer than Darner's story had indicated.

When I called Sunset Sporting Goods, the employees there were unable to give me any information about the Darners' entering the local big buck contest and said they no longer had the Polaroid photos they had taken of contest entries. Even though I still had no concrete evidence that Darner was lying, I had strong suspicions that something wasn't right. And that's when I received in the mail an envelope with no return name or address, and it was an item that was simultaneously confusing and shocking.(To be continued)

The envelope was addressed to my last name only, misspelled "LARROCCO." In it was a black-and-white 3 1/2 x 5-inch snapshot along with a short, unsigned letter. The letter stated that the photo was taken in the 50s and showed "Bob Housholder, who is now 65 yrs old." The letter also pointed out, as several others already had noticed, that two different bucks shown in Darner's second book, "Hunting the Rockies," were photographed in front of the same rock. Darner had claimed that he had killed one of the deer in Colorado and the other in Utah. I had already heard Darner's contention that he had hauled both carcasses to a favorite location where he liked to photograph trophies. Indeed the first time I had visited him he had taken me to such a location, where I had photographed him with some of his heads. But the old picture was harder to explain. Even a cursory look at the snapshot showed that this rack was configured exactly the same as the antlers of the buck shown on the cover of "How to Find Giant Bucks." Both racks had some rare and distinguishable features, such as a so-called acorn point on the right antler, a downturned main beam, a cluster of three points on the G3 tine along with a cheater point and a curved down cheater off the G4 point. The brow tines also appeared to be identical.

The antler configuration alone wasn't quite enough proof, however. A few years earlier I had leased a big ranch in northern Utah, and one of my guides, Jason Barlow, had found a big non-typical antler on the property. If the other antler had been identical, the buck would have scored about 230 Boone and Crockett points. This non-typical antler had bases that were about 5 1/2 inches in circumference and carried eight or nine points, including two or three cheater points. Later I found what I was sure was the other antler, but it was a typical antler that, if matched, would have comprised a trophy scoring a bit over 190 B&C. A couple of months later, a poacher on our property killed a deer that had a rack that was almost a perfect match for the sheds we had found. (That poacher was a relative of one of my other guides, Rocky VanderSteen, who also had a suspiciously large number of trophy-class mule deer in his trophy room. I suspected that Rocky had told his family member where to trespass with the least likelihood of being caught.)

We compared the poached deer's antlers with the sheds that we happened to have in camp. The poached buck appeared to be younger than the animal that had left the sheds, based on mass alone; the poached deer's antler bases weren't much more than four inches in circumference. However, the sheds showed the same bends and curves, and the non-typical points were almost identical except for some missing cheaters. Yet the poached rack featured short ridges in the exact locations of the cheaters, indicating to me where cheater points probably have have grown if the deer had been allowed to live another year. Yet I was convinced that the sheds came from a different deer, based simply on mass. Later that year, during the November blackpowder season, I had a chance to hunt myself. While hunting with Rex Thomas, a freelancer who had been an editor at Petersen's Hunting Magazine and a PR man at Browning and is now an employee of the National Rifle Association, I missed a huge buck. That animal circled us and perched on a rocky hillside out of muzzleloader range, wary of us but not wanting to leave the vicinity of a dozen does. Rex got out his spotting scope, and we were able to watch that deer for five minutes. That deer appeared to be the same one that had dropped the shed antlers that Jason and I had found and had the same antler configuration and the same cheaters.

I decided to examine the Housholder photograph more closely. With a 10x loupe I could see what was essentially a fingerprint of the Housholder buck. When an antler grows, blood veins in the velvet leave deposits of calcium on the surface of the antlers. The deposits are left in ridges and dots or tiny mounds. The ridges indicate exactly how the veins were patterned, and the dots appear in unique patterns known as beading. Even two clones of the same buck would show different ridge and beading patterns. If the Housholder buck and the Darner buck were one and the same, surely a close examination would determine that.