Famous actors, astronauts, and sportsmen have been featured at the Lander One Shot Antelope Hunt, coming up later this month, but a hunt 25 years ago by then-Gov. Jim Geringer was one of the most unusual ever.
Astronauts Jim Lovell and Frank Borman, actors Roy Rogers and Larry Hagman, sportsmen like Joe Foss and Chuck Yeager, and others have annually populated the event. Locals justifiably call it the Super Bowl of Shooting Sports.
As the long-time One Shot Hunt historian and official photographer, there are not many people who have attended as many One Shot Antelope Hunt events as me. But one of the craziest ones occurred 25 years about right now.
It was a hunt that then- Gov. Jim Geringer will never forget.
I accompanied Geringer on his hunt and it was a doozy.
He was using his son-in-law’s loads and perhaps over-estimated their power. When he aimed at his antelope, it started moving and when he led it, he shot it but only wounded it. The buck ran over the hill. What to do now?
Normally, the guides get back into the four-wheel drive vehicles and try to track the animal. Pronghorn Antelope are the swiftest animals in North America, capable of running 60 mph, and there is no way a human can stalk one on foot.
Until this Saturday.
Stalking Antelope On Foot?
Geringer told his guides Bill Gustin and Travis Moffat that he would take off on foot and he encouraged them to go find a buck for his hunting partner, the former Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson of Alpine, Tex.
It took Jackson, a tall rangy, slow-talking feller, just 29 minutes to bag his antelope with one shot from about 300 yards near Silver Creek. Then Gustin and I took off to find the governor.
We were occasionally able to talk by cell phone and once in a while, we would see him walking along the tops of the high hills and ridges. After a while, we were able to drive up and meet with him. He had been on his own for over an hour by then and had walked up and down hills four miles from his original starting point.
Geringer jumped into Gustin’s pickup and we drove for about two minutes before he decided the country was too big and he felt he had been on the buck’s trail of small blood spots. He said he would meet us at Diamond Springs, which was a long, long ways off but it was in the direction the antelope was going.
So, we left him there on the ridge line and headed back to Joaquin where Travis was cleaning his animal.
Of course, back then, cell phones would only work when we were both on top of ridges or hills, which is sort of hard to do since most roads follow the valleys.
We gradually headed over to a high area and waited. And waited some more.
Lost A Governor?
The guides on the One Shot are among the best around. They often joke that they’ve never lost a hunter yet in 60 years. Gustin may have been thinking aloud when he said, “I wonder if anyone has lost a governor before?”
We finally made contact and found out Geringer was on the Oregon Trail, which was over five miles, as the crow flies, from where we were and more than that by the circular roads we had to take.
Later at the Saturday night banquet Geringer told the 650 people present how we finally connected by cell phone. “ Where are you at?” the governor asked me, “I’m at Rocky Ridge.”
“We’re at Rocky Ridge, too. I am standing next to the sign that says Rocky Ridge,” I replied. “Where are you?”
“Well, I’m standing with a group of Mormon folks from Utah next to the Rocky Ridge monument, where are you?”
Rocky Ridge is a notorious spot on the Oregon Trail where sharp rocks can slice into your boots if you are not careful. It was one of the most dangerous places on the entire Oregon Trail.
Befuddled Mormon Tourists
Geringer had met three carloads of Utah Mormons retracing the Mormon Trail. They saw this orange-clad apparition walk up to them from a hillside – no vehicle in sight (they didn’t know it was opening day of hunting season) – and this apparition, with a gun over his arm and a funny medicine bag around his neck, greeted them.
Geringer related this story to the Saturday night crowd. “I finally broke the news to them that I was governor but they didn’t react very well to it. Finally, one of them got his Wyoming highway map out of the car and said, by golly, he really is the governor. What the heck are you doing out here all alone?” It took the cell phone ringing to finally convince them that things were all right.
Geringer had even helped them guide their vehicles over the rough rocks at Rocky Ridge and had his picture taken with them. He was about a half mile from us over another hill.
We told him to start walking toward us and we’d pick him up.
He was still game. And he was still looking for that doggone antelope. So, we drove for about ten minutes along a ridge, but no luck. We were now ten miles from where the original shot was taken and both Bill Gustin and I were wondering just how determined is this guy?
Later, Joaquin (who had spent a career stalking people) admiringly said he thought Geringer was “the stubbornnest guy I ever did see.”
Finally, Geringer was getting impatient and suggested we turn around and head back in the original direction. Then he got out and walked over the ridge. Pretty soon, he motioned that he thought he had found that buck.
Sure enough, it was the same one.
Geringer quickly loaded up, took aim, shot and put the injured buck out its pain.
Later that night at the banquet, Geringer would say, “That antelope would have died a natural death – he would have been eaten by a coyote, probably eaten alive. I didn’t want that – I wanted to put him out of his misery.
“I passed up several other big bucks as I was stalking the injured one. It sure would have been easy to just blast another one and go about my business, but that isn’t the ethic of Wyoming hunting and the ethic of the One Shot.”
Geringer Hiked 12 Miles
We estimated that Geringer had walked 12 miles over four hours on some of the roughest terrain in Wyoming on probably the hottest day in the history of the One Shot. He crossed Rocky Ridge three times. His cowboy boots had several big holes in them.
Geringer had told his audience Saturday night about how his dad moved to America from Russia because he wanted to own his own land. Geringer obviously is tough and he obviously has strong feelings about how things should be done here in Wyoming.
He got a standing ovation from the hunter-friendly crowd when he wrapped up his talk by saying: “They can pry my gun from my cold, dead hands . . . but that can’t take the spirit from my heart.”
I appreciated what Joaquin said about the governor when he used one of his old Texas Ranger expressions to describe Geringer: “He’ll do to ride a river with.”
