Охотник из Outdoor Life осужден за незаконную охоту на частной территории

Editor’s Note: This spring Outdoor Life published a feature story and video that detailed a unique and controversial method of accessing otherwise inaccessible public land. Our hunting and conservation editor and his buddies chartered a helicopter to fly into an area of public land that was surrounded by private ranches. Their plan was to document the experience with both stories and video. While on this hunt, one of the local ranchers attempted to steal a harvested bull elk from the group, as a way of deterring them, and others, from accessing the area again. The hunters captured this encounter on camera and the incident went viral. It was covered in several regional news outlets and hunting media podcasts and websites. However, we did not know that during this hunt our editor accidentally trespassed on private land. This mistake was captured on video and published. In order to tell the full truth and consequences of this incident, we are publishing the details of our editor’s charges and conviction in the story below. Call it 35 yards. That’s the approximate distance the 6×6 Wyoming bull was standing inside private land when I shot him last November, on camera and proud of my accomplishment. But the yardage might as well have been a thousand miles given the consequences of my actions. The bull was not standing 30-some yards inside Wyoming’s state school-trust land, as I had believed. Instead, he was on unmarked private land, which I did not have permission to hunt. After that fatal shot, the bull ran even farther onto private land before it died and rolled downhill toward the public-land border, where I processed the carcass, hung the meat to cool, and hiked back to camp, oblivious that I had just violated a cardinal rule of the field. The entire scene is laid out in the video we shot of the hunt and later published on Outdoor Life’s YouTube channel. That video, which now has more than 220,000 views, garnered so much attention partly because of how we accessed the area, and partly because of what transpired later. We took the extraordinary step of hiring a helicopter to airlift my hunting party deep inside the land-blocked paradise of public land. While we were there, the very landowner who controls access to this public land attempted to steal one of my buddies’ elk racks. He did it, the landowner said on video, to deter us from hunting the land. (That bull was harvested legally on public ground.) But it turned out the viral video documented another violation: my shot on a different bull standing inside the unmarked private-land boundary. The video was studied closely by the landowner, who recognized landmarks on his private property and suspected I had trespassed. He then alerted a warden with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, who investigated the scene and subsequently served me with a citation for trespassing. I answered those charges this week in the Johnson County Circuit Court in Buffalo, where I pleaded no contest and paid the required fines. I also surrendered the bull that I had shot. The most painful penalty is that, in this case, I became part of the problem. For nearly 30 years, I have been an advocate for public-land conservation and public-land hunters. It’s not an exaggeration to say this has been my life’s work and has defined me both personally and professionally. This work has come from the perspective that we public-land hunters are the good guys. We can share the land, follow the rules, and respect private landowners’ rights. To now publicly admit that I failed to uphold those values hurts beyond description. Another penalty is more personal but equally enduring: trying to understand how I could have made such a basic and unforgivable mistake. Watching the Line I have an idea how it happened. There were five of us, and after spotting elk from high on a ridge, we hiked a mile or so to a sparsely timbered knob that would place us within rifle range of the bulls if they emerged from timber in the last hour of daylight, as we hoped they would. As we gathered on the knob, the five of us studied the arrangement of land spread out before us. We were on state land and, in front of us, a connected section of BLM land rose into the heavy timber where the elk were bedded. But a quarter-section — 160 acres — of private land laid horizontally along the base of the timber to the east of the BLM section. We used our rangefinders to determine the distance of various landmarks, and then used the digital mapping app onX Hunt to determine land ownership. There were no fences or other land-ownership demarcations on the steep slope covered by grass, stunted junipers, and large rocks. As the evening wore on, the group of elk emerged from the timber, on BLM land, but they were too far for an ethical shot. In the video, you can hear me narrate the moment. “We’re on public. The elk are on public. But we have to tippy-toe because there’s a private quarter-section. So we just have to kind of keep watching to see where we are and make sure that everything is good.” We watched as the elk drifted through a corner of the private inholding, but we were encouraged to see that they were headed toward a spring-fed seep that was on the state land. As the elk moved southeast, past our lookout, I decided to move to get a better shot as they headed to water. It was a tough call, because the videographer and I would be moving in plain view of the elk; we had only a thin screen of pines to hide our movement. After about five minutes of crawling and hunched-over shuffling, I reached a dead tree that would serve as a shooting rest. When I looked up, I noticed at least two bulls trotting back uphill, presumably spooked by our movement. But there was the big bull, not too far away, looking at me head-on, body tense as though he, too, was about to bolt. Here’s my first and biggest mistake. Instead of ranging the bull and consulting my onX app to confirm he was on public land, I lined up my rifle and delivered a shot. It hit him where I intended, just left of his sternum. He wobbled, then lunged uphill. I shot two more times, but they were unnecessary. Heart-shot, he finally stopped, reared back, and rolled, dead as a stone, back toward me. Here’s my second mistake. I recall briefly thinking that his lunge and run might have placed him on private land, but because he rolled downhill toward me, I concluded that he was squarely on public land. But I never confirmed this assumption. I fist-bumped the videographer, who had recorded the scene, then joined my buddies to celebrate the kill. The bull had died on a steep slope just above a flat spot, and we dragged him a few yards to the flat, where we broke him down, bagged his quarters, and packed for the steep climb back to camp. I didn’t once think that I had trespassed. I recall my relief after the shot that the bull had kept his trajectory off the private land and stayed on the public land. But, looking at waypoints and aerial photos in the warden’s investigation months later, I concede that the bull was between 25 and 50 yards inside the private inholding. That includes the 5-yard difference between the digital boundary shown by onX and the surveyed boundary determined by a BLM monument marker that the warden found on the hillside. Return to the Scene I had hoped to return to the site, to see for myself the lay of the land and reconcile my recollections with screenshots of the video, which the game warden used to line up landmarks with property lines and conclude the bull was standing on the private inholding when I shot him. Problem is, this is such difficult land to access that, even without the burden of hunting gear, I couldn’t find a way to hike in. So I wrote the landowner — the very landowner who had been charged with criminal misdemeanor theft for taking my buddy’s elk antlers — asking him to accompany me back to the kill site so I could try to understand how I could have made such a profound mistake. I naively hoped a meeting might also lower the tension around our separate but connected legal issues. Despite follow-up messages with the landowner, he didn’t respond to my request to revisit the site. Without the ability to re-enact the hunt, I relied on onX, paper BLM maps, and Google Earth to plot landmarks and establish my shooting location, the bull’s location when I shot, and the carcass location. My first instinct was to fight the trespass charge. I was sure enough of myself and my repeated insistence in the field that we do everything right on this hunt — after all, we were videoing nearly all our actions. I wondered if the ticket was politically motivated. It had become such a highly visible and charged case, largely because of our video, that I was sure I was being selectively prosecuted to prove a point about the perils of accessing otherwise inaccessible public land by helicopter. But after plotting waypoints from the warden’s investigation, looking at landmarks in the video, and overlaying property boundaries, it is clear that I made a mistake. A Lingering Lesson Fallout from my actions will stay with me for years. I will resign from my 25-year tenure as a Montana Hunter Education instructor, because I can’t in good conscience teach prospective hunters about the importance of obtaining landowner permission with this incident on my record. I will accept judgement from friends and hunting buddies and a legion of online commentators who have never met me. But the most damning part of this incident is that it damages the point I was trying to make by filming the hunt in the first place. We flew into this area of Wyoming to prove that a group of public-land hunters using a creative access tool could find success in a place that has become a private elk-hunting paradise for the landowners who profit from their exclusive access. Our fly-in was a response to this situation that occurs all around the West: landowners who have turned our public land into their own property, for all practical purposes. The landowner who we tangled with sells outfitted elk hunts on this ground. But our project depended on doing everything correctly, and the fact that I shot my bull on deeded land where I didn’t have permission compromises the larger purpose of our hunt. That’s as hard to write as it has been to admit, because my actions have impugned the reputation of every other public-land hunter who knows and follows the law and respects the sanctity of private land, and for that I am deeply sorry. One way to look at this case is as another skirmish in a long-running conflict between private-property owners and public-land users. Some might conclude my actions were scrutinized especially closely by a landowner with a score to settle. But those are the wrong lessons. Mine is a simple case of acting on a wrong assumption and failing to correct myself in a few fateful seconds. As we teach beginning hunters: Be sure of your shot, because you can never take it back. But we teach another lesson, too: Do the right thing, even when no one is looking. In this case, everyone was looking, which makes my acknowledgement that I did the wrong thing especially necessary.