On the Elk Hunt : Santa Rosa Island Takes the Prize as Far as Records Go

Wayne Long and Don Cox were lying in wet grass, on the edge of a thicket of island oaks. Long peered intently through a spotting telescope, at the top of a knoll. About 300 yards beneath them, eerie images drifted in and out of morning fog, as in a dream.

What they saw makes a big game hunter’s breath stop, his heart jump and his palms turn wet--a half dozen bull elk, their antlers twisting cautiously in the air, as if on full alert.

Long was the hunting guide, Cox the hunter. For several minutes, Long carefully moved the field scope on its small tripod from bull to bull, counting antler tips. Cox cradled Long’s 1953 Model .70 Winchester, at the ready.

Long whispered: “Don, the one on the far left is a five-by-five (points on the antlers). The others are all threes and fours. I think we can find something better tomorrow.”

Cox replied: “OK, I’ve got five days, I’m in no hurry.”

They rose to their feet. The elk, spooked, trotted over the knoll and disappeared into fog.

Long and Cox walked back up a steep hill, through a wet, mossy grove of island oaks, back to the pickup truck, parked just off a trail.

Long, a wildlife management biologist from West Point, Calif., has been guiding elk and deer hunters around Santa Rosa Island since 1979. Cox, from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., had come to Santa Rosa in hopes of adding a six-by-six Roosevelt elk to his trophy room.

One of the best-kept secrets in the world of big-game hunting in California--or the entire country, for that matter--is Santa Rosa Island, a 10x15-mile piece of real estate 27 sea miles from Ventura. There are roughly 1,000 Roosevelt elk on the island.

What’s more, half of the 16 trophy Roosevelt elk listed in the Safari Club International’s record book were shot on Santa Rosa.

And you don’t even need a hunting license to hunt a trophy bull elk on Santa Rosa, since the island is privately owned. The cost of a five-day hunt for a six-by-six elk is $6,000. For a five-pointer, it’s $4,800. A three-day hunt for a four-pointer is $3,000. And all elk hunts include a doe mule deer and a wild pig.

The next morning, Long and Cox were rolling slowly over a mountainside road in the pickup, looking for elk down below, on ridge tops, in canyon bottoms, on hillsides.

“There’s three down there, Don,” Long said, looking at a ridge top beneath the road. “OK, they’re all threes--nothing there you’d be interested in.”

As the pickup accelerated, the three bulls began running along their ridge in the same general direction. Traveling uphill, toward the road, they would intersect the pickup in about 200 yards. When they saw the vehicle, they turned and ran downhill, crossing over a knoll upon which some island oaks grew.

Long, watching them, did a double take. The three young bulls were running directly at a lone, mature bull--a broad-shouldered creature with enormous antlers. The bull looked almost quizzically at the three young bulls running past him.

Long, by now peering through the scope, whispered: “Don, it’s a six-by-six. It’s a gorgeous animal. I think it’s what you’ve come here for, and if you want him you’d better take him right now, because he’s getting ready to move.”

A perfect shot. About 250 yards below, Cox’s 180-grain soft-point slug slammed into the bull just behind the shoulder. The big bull arched its back once, then collapsed, rolled over the knoll and out of sight. It crashed to the bottom of a ravine, dead.

Long congratulated Cox. “That one just might put you in the record book, Don, let’s go have a look.”

Climbing down a steep, grassy hill to the ravine, Long and Cox discovered that the real work would now begin. The elk had tumbled legs-down into a narrow, dry stream. The prospect of field dressing an 800- or 900-pound animal at the bottom of a ravine and carrying it, in parts, back up the hill wasn’t a happy one.

“You know, you could have shot him so that he stayed on top of the hill,” Long said, jokingly.

Long and Cox managed to get the animal turned over. Long then began a field dressing operation that took about three hours. It attracted about a thousand chicken-sized ravens, which circled raucously overhead, awaiting the leftovers.

Long, 50, hauled 75- to 100-pound sections of shoulder and hind sections, and the head and antlers to the top of the hill, on his back.

He made preliminary, rough measurements of the elk’s massive rack. The base of each antler was the circumference of a man’s forearm. Record-book elk, as well as all other antlered game animals, are graded by antler-measuring formulas that consider length of the main beams, number and length of points and the base circumference of the main beams.

“I’m almost sure this animal goes into the SFI (Safari Club International record) book,” Long said.

Later, at the hunting lodge, a more careful measurement of the antlers, but still an unofficial one, pegged Cox’s elk as the 12th-ranked Roosevelt elk ever taken. And on the following day, another hunter, Elbert Houghton of Manhattan Beach, bagged an even more impressive animal, one that unofficially scored out as the fourth all-time Roosevelt elk.

Cox pried off his boots and leaned back on a couch at the lodge. He was roughly in the middle of a series of hunting trips that would have taxed a marathon runner, to say nothing of his checkbook. Cox is no lightweight in big-game hunting circles. His name appears as frequently in the Safari Club International record book as Babe Ruth’s does in the baseball record book.

“I came here directly from Venezuela, where I bagged a tropical white-tailed deer,” he said. “I’ll go from here to Colorado for another white-tail hunt, then go to Spain for hunts for shamus goat and Spanish red deer, from there to Austria for an Alpine ibex, and then to Yugoslavia for a brown bear and roe deer. I should be gone 2 1/2 months.”

Cox, who owns a steel processing plant in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and two others in Connecticut, is a lean, fit-looking 64. But two years ago, doctors turned on a red flashing light over Cox.

“Some heart irregularities turned up in a physical, and my doctor told me I was a set-up for a heart attack,” he said. “I’ve been on a strict diet ever since, gone from 192 pounds to 160 and feel much better. When I plan hunting trips like this, I mail copies of my diet (which includes boiled or steamed potatoes, vegetables, fruit, oatmeal and plain pasta) ahead of time.”

Roosevelt elk on Santa Rosa Island eat slightly better than Don Cox, dining on several grasses and coyote brush.

The news that big-game hunters have been getting record Roosevelt elk on a little-known island off the Southern California coast in recent years has arrived slowly. The island has been owned by the Santa Barbara-based Vail & Vickers Co. since 1901.

It’s believed that the elk were barged down from Washington’s Olympic peninsula and turned loose on the island in the 1920s and ‘30s. Mule deer from Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest were also introduced by Vail & Vickers in the 1920s. A third game animal, wild pigs, are descendants of animals left on the island by 15th and 16th Century Portuguese and Spanish mariners, to give future visitors a food source.

Santa Rosa deer hunters often find themselves pursuing beach bucks. On the island’s west coast, four- and five-point mule deer bucks are often spotted on the cliff tops, above the island’s beautiful, desolate beaches.

Long is a wildlife management biologist known for his expertise in big-game animal management. In 1982, he was interviewed by incoming Deukmejian Administration officials, when he was a candidate to be director of the Department of Fish and Game.

Besides the elk hunting program on Santa Rosa, he also runs the hunting operation at the state’s largest private hunting preserve, Dye Creek Ranch, near Red Bluff, as well as the Pit River Waterfowl Club and the Cosumnes Wetlands Duck Club, both in Northern California.

He, like many others in California hunting circles, was startled to learn that Roosevelt elk existed on Santa Rosa.

“The Vails contacted me in 1977 about my running an elk hunting program here, and I was amazed,” he said. “I never knew there were elk out here, nor did a lot of people who do a lot of big-game hunting. But that’s just the way this island is--it’s been privately owned for almost a hundred years. Just about everything about it is news to people.”

That will change in coming years. Eventually, Santa Rosa, as well as neighboring Santa Cruz Island, will be part of Channel Islands National Park, which currently includes San Miguel, Anacapa and Santa Barbara islands.

According to the Park Service, Vail & Vickers has agreed upon a sale price of $30 million for Santa Rosa Island. But still being negotiated is a Vail & Vickers lease-back option whereby the firm can continue to run cattle--there are roughly 6,000 head on the island now--on the island and operate its hunting program for an undetermined number of years.

Eventually, all of the island’s elk, deer and pigs must be removed.

“It’s departmental policy that all Park Service lands contain no exotics,” Park Service spokesman Nick Whelan said. “Our hope is that the animals will be removed before we take over the island.”

Santa Rosa Island elk hunters are trophy hunters, one of two types of elk hunters one finds during fall Rocky Mountain or Roosevelt elk hunting seasons in Western states.

“Most of the guys who come over here are older guys who’ve hunted all their lives but who haven’t bagged that one big, trophy elk for the den wall,” Long said.

Santa Rosa Island elk hunts don’t call for arduous horse pack trips. Nor are advanced stalking skills required. Most often, guide and hunter travel the island’s network of winding dirt roads in a pickup, spot a desired animal, arrive at a favorable shooting position, and shoot it.

By contrast, most elk habitat in the United States is of a more inaccessible kind, difficult to reach even in the best of conditions. Rick Hacker of Beverly Hills is a 19th Century firearms buff who hunts elk in Wyoming or Montana almost every fall--usually without success.

“I pack in with a guide on horseback to thick forested areas at 8,000 to 10,000-foot elevations,” he said. “In true elk habitat, that’s where the big bulls are. A guide charges about $300 a day and the hunts usually run 10 days. Guides don’t like to book a trip for less than that.

“On four of the five elk hunts I’ve been on, I never saw an elk because the weather was bad and visibility was so poor. On the first one, I got a five-point bull with one of my old black-powder guns, a Model .54 1863 Sharps rifle.

“Santa Rosa isn’t the kind of hunt that would turn me on, but it’s great for a guy chained to a desk who wants that trophy animal and who can’t afford the time to take a 10-day hunt someplace.”

Roosevelt elk, the largest big-game animals in Southern California, have increased in numbers on Santa Rosa Island from an estimated 500 to 700 in 1977 to about 1,000 today.

“In ‘79, we took only bulls, because we weren’t certain what we had out here, in terms of a bull-to-cow ratio,” Long said. “We’ve got a very healthy 54 bulls per 100 cows now. It was 30 when we started.

“Before, a lot of the cows for a variety of reasons were excluded from the breeding cycle, which isn’t good. Now, you rarely see a cow here in the springtime without a calf.”

The October-November rutting period on Santa Rosa applies as much stress to the bull elk as do hunters, Long said.

“It’s kind of pitiful, watching a bull run around like a sheep dog, keeping 20 cows together and fighting off younger bulls,” he said. “Some of them don’t eat, and you can see their backbones sticking up. A lot of them get so weak they don’t recover and just lay down and die after the rut.”

Long said that about 30 bull elk are taken in the September and October bull seasons, and roughly 100 cows in August.

Hunters eat, sleep and swap hunting tales in the Vails’ 90-year-old ranch house. They share this camaraderie with an island spotted skunk, which emerges from a hole in the upstairs bathroom wall and prowls the house at night, searching for food scraps.

Elk, also called wapiti, their Shawnee Indian name, were extremely important to native Americans. The journals of Lewis & Clark contain 570 separate references to the animal they called elk.

Roosevelt elk once ranged from the San Francisco Bay area north to Vancouver Island, but were slaughtered by market hunters during the Gold Rush era in California. Before the arrival of Europeans, elk were hunted by numerous California Indian tribes, including the Pomo, Sinkyone, Mattole, Wiyot, Yurok and Tolowa tribes.

Hunting methods included driving the animals into pits containing upward-pointed spears, the use of dogs to drive elk into snares, bows and arrows, or driving elk into corrals.

Indians used elk for more than food. Skins were used for tepee covers and clothing. They also used the elk’s upper canines, pearl-shaped teeth called “buglers” as an ornamental item. Some 19th Century photographs of Indian women in formal dress show some with hundreds of elk canines sewn into their dresses.

Elk antlers were used to haul firewood, for bows, spear tips, saddle frames, knife blades, fish hooks, chisels, ladles, hide scrapers, splints and tool handles.

Roosevelt elk are slightly larger and fuller bodied than their cousins, Rocky Mountain elk. Tule elk, which evolved in California’s San Joaquin Valley, are smaller still. Roosevelt elk antlers are slightly heavier and thicker at the base than those of Rocky Mountain elk, which have longer, more slender racks.

The night wind howled and huge swells broke over the decks in great waves. It was a stormy February night in 1962. The Chickasaw, a disabled freighter, was being blown by a storm toward the jagged west coast of Santa Rosa Island.

The ship, on its way from Yokohama to San Pedro, went on the rocks with a great crunch, and its crew abandoned ship.

The Chickasaw remains today where it ran aground nearly 25 years ago--in three great rusted chunks. In the surf, it still rolls slightly, beneath a sandstone cliff.

Gulls roost on high points of the ship’s skeleton. Waves roll over the bow section, almost totally submerged.

The wreck is visible for miles along Santa Rosa’s west coast, and will be a prime viewing attraction for future camera-bearing hikers and backpackers on Santa Rosa, when the island is brought into the national park system.

But for future visitors, Santa Rosa’s marvelous beaches, particularly on its west coast, will be the main event. They are immaculate, white-sand beaches with no footprints. In the three miles north of the Chickasaw wreck, there are four beaches worthy of an airline billboard.

One curious sight on the west coast are the dilapidated remains of an Air Force DEW (Distant Early Warning System) base, abandoned in the early 1960s. Barracks buildings, graffiti-decorated and windows long broken out, bear scars of numerous beer busts by mainland teen-agers over the last two decades. One or more of the battered buildings may be turned into a Park Service headquarters building. A youth hostel is another possibility.

Santa Rosa, at 84 square miles, is the second largest of the Channel Islands. It is less rugged than its neighbor, Santa Cruz Island. A major fault runs east and west across the center of the island, forming a predominant single ridge that reaches 1,580 feet at its high point.

Among the island’s natural resources is a 40-acre stand of healthy, expanding torrey pines near Santa Rosa’s south tip. The only other place in the world where the species is found naturally is San Diego County. Endemic island oaks are found at a few locations on the island, but are thought not to be reproducing.

A visitor driving along the island’s roads might see 100 tiny island foxes in a day. Anthropologists believe the foxes, which are found on six of the eight Channel Islands, were brought to the islands centuries ago as pets of mainland Chumash Indian children. Virtually tame, the foxes can be easily photographed.

Among the Santa Rosa’s anthropological and paleontological resources are numerous Indian burial sites and fossil remains of a prehistoric dwarf species of elephant.

After the Park Service takeover, the island’s roads will become hiking trails. It is anticipated that the island will be managed, at least at first, on a limited-entry, low-intensity use basis.

A preliminary Park Service management plan for Santa Rosa calls for a prohibition of regular air service. And since it’s a long boat trip from the mainland and safe anchorages around the island are scarce, visits are expected to be light. Another limiting factor is a scarcity of fresh water.

The plan also calls for Santa Rosa, overgrazed by cattle and sheep for nearly a century, to be brought back to a vegetative state of “pre-European man.”

And what will happen to the Roosevelt elk, Santa Rosa residents for most of this century? If the National Park Service continues to insist that they be removed, they could end up in a Vernon meat packing plant.

The owners of the island, Vail & Vickers, have a commercial game breeder’s license, and they could legally sell the elk to a meat packer. Or the herd could be hunted down to zero. Or a combination of both could occur. Some animals could be relocated to suitable habitat on the mainland.

Long said: “The whole thing will be up in the air until we know what the terms of the deal with the Park Service are. We could be running the hunting operation for a period of years or we could have to decide what to do with the elk next year.”