The Great American Antler Boom

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In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some antlers are easy to find. A large arch of intertwined elk antlers greets passengers as they arrive at the local airport, and, in town, antler chandeliers hang from tall ceilings at a high-end furniture store. Jackson’s trademark is a town square with four archways; each arch was made from some fourteen thousand pounds of antler. Most of the antlers come from the National Elk Refuge, an expanse of hills and meadows on the outskirts of Jackson where roughly eight thousand elk spend the winter. The animals eat government-funded alfalfa pellets, living in a carefully managed symbiosis with a town that presents itself as a frontier outpost, and which has a median home price of three million dollars.

Unlike horns, which are permanently attached to an animal’s head, antlers regenerate annually. Adult male elk, or bulls, grow their antlers between April and August. During this period, the antlers are soft, cartilaginous, and covered in fine hair—known as “velvet”—and they contain reproducing stem cells. At the end of the summer, the antlers ossify, and elk scrape the velvet off on trees. The velvet is filled with blood vessels, so the process leaves a gory mess; blood stains the hard antlers, and sap, dirt, and tree bark color them further.

Around September, mating season begins, and bulls use their antlers to spar with one another when vying for breeding rights with cows. “There’s a relation between antler size and sperm counts,” Matthew Metz, a wildlife biologist and research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project, told me. “It’s an honest advertisement.” When bulls are done breeding, their testosterone levels fall, and so do their antlers. In the spring, the bones are cast off, leaving behind bloody pedicles. The wounds heal, regrowth begins, and people start searching for the antlers that have been shed. The bones are valuable: last summer, top-grade elk antler sold for sixteen dollars a pound. (A large shed antler might weigh ten pounds.) Collectors are known to pay upward of fifteen hundred dollars for a particularly desirable pair of antlers, and tens of thousands of dollars for deadheads—skulls with the antlers still attached.

On the National Elk Refuge, only the staff and local Boy Scouts are permitted to collect antlers, which are sold in an annual auction. But though the elk may eat the refuge’s alfalfa, they don’t have much use for arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries, so they frequently wander onto adjacent public lands, which are managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Each year, on the first of May, those lands open to shed hunters. “You get to put your hands on something no one else has ever touched,” a shed hunter from Minnesota told me. “And then you get to take it home!”

The May hunt is feverish, and occasionally dangerous. It used to begin at midnight, but in 2015 a shed hunter on horseback tried to cross a river and was swept away. The man survived, but the horse drowned. The derby’s start has since been amended to 6 A.M.

On April 30, 2021, shed hunters began arriving in southwest Jackson, at the Teton County Fairgrounds, a designated waiting area twenty-five minutes from where the hunt would take place. They drove trucks with window stickers that said “RISE AND SHED” and “SHED LIFE”; some hauled horse trailers. Many of them were locals, while others had come from Utah and Idaho, New York and Wisconsin. Nearly all of them were men, a good number of whom were dressed in camouflage—an unnecessary choice, given that antlers don’t run. But many shed hunters are also proud hunters, and the physical demands of the two sports are similar: both can require endurance in rough, mountainous terrain. Amid thick deadfall in the high country, every root and bleached cow femur can resemble an antler. Some shed hunters use trained dogs; others rely on expensive optics. That afternoon, workers from a cheese-processing plant in Utah played with a spotting scope—a device that can detect sheds from hundreds of yards away. Nearby, a coed group from Kansas was huddled around a pickup truck, where a twenty-seven-year-old Pfizer employee was holding court. He told his friends that he had run more than seven hundred miles in the past nine months to prepare for antler season.

As night approached, people drank beer and prepared to sleep in their cars. Early the next morning, police officers began escorting vehicles to the east end of town, where the road turned to dirt. The cars sped off, dust and headlights creating eerie weather. A man led his horse, yelling, “He’s gonna go like a son of a bitch!” Many of the hunters headed for Flat Creek, a stream running through hills. They raced across the water and ascended into tawny meadows. One rider was bucked off his horse and injured himself. A teen-ager from Montana alleged that someone stole an antler he had spotted first. One of the shed hunters from Kansas saw a bull elk running full tilt, its tongue lolling. “I felt bad for him,” she said later. “You could tell that he’d been pushed by all these people.”

Back on the road, more vehicles kept arriving until the parking line was half a mile long. A few riders returned from the hills, their horses hauling dozens of antlers. Near a red pickup truck with Wyoming plates, a young man was standing by the head of a dead bull. The man, who said that his name was McKay, had found the bull’s carcass in the creek and decapitated it with a knife. “I got lucky,” he said. The bull’s antlers were crooked, or nontypical, which potentially made them more valuable than a normal set—they could be worth several thousand dollars. But he couldn’t leave his trophy unguarded, meaning that his day was essentially finished. “It’s over already,” he said, glumly. “It’s too bad.”

There are more than a million wild elk in North America, mostly clustered throughout the western United States and Canada. Bulls that live in forests of cedar and fir, like those in northwest Montana or in the Canadian Rockies, often color their antlers with deeper shades than those in, say, the deserts of southern Nevada. Elk wandering through old burns can rub against char-covered trees until their antlers are nearly black. Roosevelt elk and tule elk, subspecies found in Oregon and California, respectively, have shorter antlers than Rocky Mountain elk. Nontypical antlers can result from genetics or trauma; an injury to a right rear leg can result in a warped left antler, a discovery that has mystified biologists. “They’re like snowflakes,” Kevin Monteith, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wyoming, said of antlers. “Every one is unique.”

The U.S. and Canada used to have ten million elk, which roamed across the continent, including in northeastern states like Pennsylvania. By 1880, settlers had hunted the Eastern elk to extinction. Western herds nearly met the same fate; military officers had begun promoting the hunting of bison, in an attempt to subjugate Indigenous societies, and settlers showed little restraint with other species. In Wyoming, Yellowstone National Park offered a degree of protection, but poaching was still rampant, and enforcement was rare. Many elk were killed simply for their teeth. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the New York-based fraternal organization whose members included President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Babe Ruth, had adopted an elk tooth—an ivory—as an emblem, and members coveted the teeth for cufflinks. According to reports, these ivories sold for thirty dollars a pair by the early twentieth century, or the equivalent of a thousand dollars today.

Poaching slowed once the federal government, under pressure from conservationists, passed legislation prohibiting interstate wildlife trafficking. Wyoming enforced stricter punishments for those who killed animals for their teeth, and the Elks, having proved themselves to be neither benevolent nor protective, dropped the emblem. But there was another problem: Western expansion had begun to disrupt elk migration patterns. The Jackson herd had a wide range, travelling as far as Yellowstone, fifty miles north, and perhaps as far south as the Green River Basin, two hundred miles away. Homesteaders built towns and barbed-wire fences in the middle of these migration routes, and in Jackson Hole opportunistic elk found sustenance in the form of ranchers’ hay. The winter of 1909 was especially severe, and starving elk stormed the town of Jackson, looking for food. A large number of elk perished; it was said that you could walk for two miles over carcasses. In response, settlers began feeding the elk hay in the winter, and Congress soon appropriated money for the creation of feed grounds. With the frontier declared closed and Indigenous tribes living on reservations, the federal government saw Wyoming elk as a matter of national interest. In 1910, game managers across the West started importing elk from the Jackson herd to revitalize flagging populations in other states.

“Looks like Broadway’s back.”

Cartoon by Kate Curtis

Two years later, Congress created the National Elk Refuge, which eventually expanded its acreage by acquiring property from John D. Rockefeller and other wealthy landowners. Natural challenges soon arose. One year, there was too little snow, which meant not enough grass for hay the following summer; another year, there was too much snow, which led to winterkill within the herd. Then there were the antlers, lurking beneath the snow—an algorithmically multiplying threat to tires and to the mechanical equipment used by refuge employees. In 1953, the Rotary Club of Jackson Hole addressed the problem by building an arch on the town square with sheds collected from the refuge. A few years later, the Rotary Club enlisted the help of local Boy Scouts to retrieve more sheds. “Shortly, three more elk horn arches rose on the Town Square,” the Jackson Hole Guide reported, “but there are more antlers each year.”

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