Winner of bison hunt raffle finds early success

By: 
Nathan Oster

Gerald Crist’s good fortune didn’t end last fall when his name was drawn in the Wyoming Governor’s Wild Bison raffle.  To his disbelief, it carried over to the hunt itself which took place early last week in a remote corner of the National Elk Refuge.

Led by guide who works for the Jackson-based outfitter Tag N Drag, Gerald harvested a bull on Monday, Jan. 6 — a day before he and his hunting companion and son Shannon had originally planned to begin their hunt.

It was a dart throw from the beginning.  Upon learning that he’d won the raffle, Gerald was immediately confronted by several choices with the potential to make or break his once-in-a-lifetime hunting opportunity.

He needed to select a guide, settling on Tag N Drag in large part because it’s licensed to operate in the National Elk Refuge.

He needed to decide what kind of bison he wanted to hunt: cow, bull or trophy. “The price goes up as you go,” he said with a laugh, “so I chose the one in the middle, the bull hunt.”

Then he needed to figure out when to hunt.  “I studied the records of when they were coming into the elk refuge,” he said. “They used to come in early and hunters used to harvest a lot of them.  But they got to where they don’t come in very often anymore, and seldom before January.  So I chose a January time frame — the 7th, the 8th and the 9th — so that’s what I paid for.”

“The whole thing was a gamble,” he said of the variables, “but those were the dates I would have guides and horses available.”

He and his son Shannon left on Sunday, Jan. 6. “We wanted to get a feel for the place,” he said. “We planned to start hunting on Tuesday, but on our way down, I think we were south of Worland when I got a call from the outfitter wanting to know if I could come a day early. Apparently, they’d seen buffalo were getting into the elk refuge.  I said sure.”

While he’d prepared for all kinds of possibilities, Gerald underestimated the toll of the hunt itself. 

“My big mistake was, I should have hired someone to teach me how to ride a horse,” he said.

It had been 30-some years since he’d been on one, 20-some for his son Shannon, who fared better.

“I stayed on my horse all right, but it was like a jackhammer,” he said. “I don’t know if I was jackhammering the horse or it was jackhammering me, but there was a lot of daylight under my butt all the time.”

Gerald, Shannon and their guide started riding well before daylight and immediately locked in on a herd of approximately 15-20 buffalo, which split into a smaller group of about eight to 10. They were “almost at the north end of the elk refuge, about to get into Grand Teton” when Gerald fired the first shot from his 6.8 Western.

Fired from a distance of 320 yards, the bullet struck the bison in the chest cavity.  “Because it was so close to the park boundary, they wanted me to keep shooting so I put three more in it to bring it down,” said Crist. “It was a tough critter.  Had it not shot it again, it would have stopped eventually.  They just didn’t want to run the risk of it making into the park.”

The guides estimated the bull to be between 4 and 5 years of age.

Tag N Drag took it from there, moving the bull from the field to a slaughterhouse where it was  skinned and quartered and ready for pickup the next day.

All Crist had to do was ride back.  A hunting trip that he’d expected to last three days was over in less than one, but he wasn’t complaining.

“Let me put it this way: I was really happy I didn’t have to ride another day.”

By Tuesday, they were back in Greybull.

“It was amazing how it all happened, but the most amazing thing of all is that we got it on the first day like that.  The odds are totally against that happening.  If you look at the harvest rate success from 2023, 47 hunters got tags, some of them even hunted for 30 days, and the overall success rate was like 38%.”

Crist said it was the third time that he’d purchased a raffle ticket. 

He did it not because he was expecting to win, but because he thought it was a good cause. “I’m going to keep buying them,” he said. “The neat thing about this tag is it doesn’t count against your lifetime quota.”

He is in the process of cutting up the meat says he plans to make a European mount of the buffalo head and tan the hide.

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