10 x 8 Colorado Monster Muley

by Shannon Straley

On  the Friday before opening day, October 17, 2003, my friends and I were scouting our usual hunting spots along the Morrison Creek Trail near Toponas, Colorado. We were about three miles west of our camp site heading up the trail to a place called “The Muddy Slide”, when my buddy Larry spotted what he thought was a bull elk grazing out in a sage brush meadow between two large stands of aspens. It was probably close to a mile or more from us when we took a look at the animal in the binoculars. We all gasped when we discovered that it was a very large buck mule deer. It was too far away to determine how many points the buck was carrying, but we all knew that it was a monster.

Well on Saturday the 18th, opening day, we all settled in to some of our favorite spots and by 10:30 am, we had a pretty good four point buck and a doe muley hanging in our lodge pole at camp. I decided to go back out and around noon the big buck had spotted me as I was walking just east of the aspens he was feeding near the day before. I tried to stalk him for at least a half a mile or so, without ever getting closer than 200 yards or a clear shooting lane and then he was gone. I headed back to camp thinking that would be my last time ever seeing a buck that size in the wild.

Well, as luck would have it! On Sunday at about 9:30 am I was near the same area I had run into that big buck the day before and my buddy Rick called me on the radio and said that he had just seen the big buck heading back into the aspens heading east. It could not have been a more perfect hunt. The wind was in my face and the buck, thinking that my buddy Rick was after him was standing just a little more than a hundred yards west of me looking back to the west for Rick. I was able to crank off a good shot just behind the right shoulder and the buck hunched up into the air and then disappeared. Bruce, another friend of mine, and I waited a little while and then began a very deliberate and slow pursuit in the general direction of where the buck had last been standing. As luck would have it, he didn’t run but about 30 yards and fell down lying next to a couple of deadfalls. The buck was even bigger than I imagined after seeing him twice before. His rack was a beautiful 10 X 8 and at least 30 inches of spread.

Well, after getting him to my taxidermist following a very successful hunt, he gross scored at 214 4/8 B & C as a non-typical and 173 5/8 as a typical mule deer. He had a spread of 29 1/4 inches and he weighed in at 245 lbs. This undoubtedly will probably be the largest deer I ever take in my life and what memories!!!