Kyle Lopez could hardly believe his eyes.
He knew the buck he had just shot was a good one but he had no idea how good.
Then 14, he had been hunting in Pike National Forest along the edge
of the Hayman Fire burn area with his father, Steed, of Divide. Time
was running out, both on last fall’s third rifle season and the
afternoon. The pair had left work and school a little early that day
and had returned to a rugged area away from the back roads
crisscrossing the region where they had seen some deer earlier.
Presently, they saw a pair of does. Then Steed spotted a buck some
150 yards away. Late-afternoon light conditions obscured the details,
but peering through his field binocular, Steed could see the antlers
were of good size.
He told Kyle to take the buck. Kyle leaned against a tree for
support and squeezed off a round from his .270 rifle. The deer
collapsed. Now it was lying on the ground by some brush, and its
antlers still seemed indistinct.
“We kept looking at it, and as we got closer, my dad told me, ‘That
bush is attacking your deer,’ ” Kyle said. “He was kind of smiling
then, but we still hadn’t had a good look at it.”
As they got closer, the “deer-attacking bush” transformed into a massive set of antlers.
“I rubbed my eyes,” Kyle said. “It was real enough. It was amazing.”
Steed knew the antlers were exceptional. A rough measurement showed
an outside spread exceeding 36 inches, the beams were heavy and all
those antler points were eye-popping. Why not get an official
measurement?
Steed brought the antlers to the attention of trophy expert Roger
Selner of Montana, a longtime official measurer for the Boone &
Crockett Club. Selner green-measured the rack in December, and in
January completed official measuring at the International Sportsmen’s
Exposition in Denver.
The verdict: The non-typical mule deer scored an official 306 3/8,
with an outside spread of 37 1/8 inches. With 26 points on the right
beam and 17 on the left, it’s the second-largest mule deer taken in
Colorado, after a 306 7/8 buck killed in 1972 by the late Lloyd Pyle
near Cortez in Montezuma County.
Kyle’s mule deer buck is the 12th largest ever taken, the largest
killed by a youth and the largest taken anywhere in the past 20 years,
according to Selner.
“It truly is impressive,” said Selner, owner of Trophy Show
Productions and World Elk Tour. “They’re a class family, and the neat
thing here is that it was taken by a kid hunting with his father on
public land, not on some high-priced guided ranch hunt.”
“I am proud of it, and sometimes it’s still a little hard to
believe,” said Kyle, a freshman at Woodland Park High School, where he
is an all-As-and-Bs student and participates in football, wrestling and
baseball.
Hunting is a family activity for the Lopez clan. Kyle and two
younger brothers are avid, all-around hunters. He’s already looking
forward to next fall, and he dreams of producing a youth-oriented
television hunting program.
“People sometimes ask me why I don’t quit now, because I’ll never
get a bigger one,” Kyle said. “Maybe so, but I won’t stop hunting. It’s
what I really enjoy doing, and you never know what you might see next.”
By Karl Licis, Special to the Hunting Guide
Lopez bags largest mule deer ever taken by a youth in United States
