Arizona Big 10?

[tjhunt2]

After coming here from Ohio in 1972, I finally got to take a big game animal for my first time in 1976. In that year I took 5 of the big ten. Buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and a javelina. Since then I have taken everything except my sheep. I've put in for 30 plus years and missed a couple years when I was out of work so my points are back around 18 for sheep. I've never used a guide, not that there is anything wrong with that, I just have always done it on my own or with family. If I end up shooting a sheep in my lifetime, which I doubt, I don't know if I would enter for the big ten award or not. It's not on my priority list of thing to do.

 

TJ

[Outdoor Writer]

Bill,

 

I think most of the guys you're talking about got what they got because of the money they had. I'm not putting them down, but about any avid hunter could have an impressive trophy room(s) with enough time and money.

 

 

Hunter74,

 

I already have my turkey slam, with Rios from TX, Eastern from MO and others states, Merriam's from AZ and others, Osceola from FL and a Gould's from Sonora.

 

And like you, I'm short a Sitka for my deer slam. I also have three subspecies of caribou -- mountain (BC), Central BG (NWT), and BG (AK). I doubt I'll ever finish either of these, though.

 

Have you ever been in the Richardson trophy room?

 

 

TJ,

 

I had 7 of the 10 very early on after moving here in 1961. By the early '70s, I already had killed two elk, two 'lopes, a few mulie and Coues bucks and several javelina.

 

I tagged the bear and my first Merriam's on the same spring hunt in about 1966 on the White Mt. res. near Cibeque when it was still legal to hunt there without a guide and all the red tape.

 

I shot my gobbler the first morning, and since I had a couple buddies still hunting the big birds, I decided to do some predator calling the next day where I had seen a few lion scrapes and tracks the day before. Ten minutes after I began calling, a very nice boar blackie walked in and hit the ground. It's the rug on the wall in this older photo of my main trophy room below.

 

I didn't hunt lion specifically until the 1980s and finally killed a dandy while hunting with Josh's dad, Randy. We were both much younger then.

 

Other than the one lion and bear, I've killed a bunch more of the same species over the last 35+ years in AZ -- and elsewhere -- while waiting to draw my sheep and bison permit. I do have three more black bears from BC, though.

 

 

[billrquimby]

CHEF: The Mexican hunter is Hubert Thummler. The book I wrote for him, "Wind In My Face," has gone into a trade edition and is available from Safari Press.

 

TONY: You are absolutely correct. It takes a lot of money to hunt 300 or more different types of big game animals in more than two dozen countries on six continents. However, it also takes a lot of drive and grit. Some of these guys are hunting more than 150 days a year. They'll go from a desert sheep hunt in Baja to the C.A.R. for elephant, then to Tajikistan for a Marco Polo argali, then to Argentina for a brocket deer, then to New Zealand for tahr and chamois, and on to Spain for all four types of "ibex" there ... all within three months or so. SCI's founder, C.J. McElroy, had two secretaries doing nothing but booking his hunts, arranging airfare, and working with taxidermists while he was chasing his Weatherby Award. Today, he'd have to do a lot more hunting than he did to compete with all the guys who also want that trophy.

 

Bill Quimby

 

 

[Outdoor Writer]

CHEF: The Mexican hunter is Hubert Thummler. The book I wrote for him, "Wind In My Face," has gone into a trade edition and is available from Safari Press.

 

TONY: You are absolutely correct. It takes a lot of money to hunt 300 or more different types of big game animals in more than two dozen countries on six continents. However, it also takes a lot of drive and grit. Some of these guys are hunting more than 150 days a year. They'll go from a desert sheep hunt in Baja to the C.A.R. for elephant, then to Tajikistan for a Marco Polo argali, then to Argentina for a brocket deer, then to New Zealand for tahr and chamois, and on to Spain for all four types of "ibex" there ... all within three months or so. SCI's founder, C.J. McElroy, had two secretaries doing nothing but booking his hunts, arranging airfare, and working with taxidermists while he was chasing his Weatherby Award. Today, he'd have to do a lot more hunting than he did to compete with all the guys who also want that trophy.

 

Bill Quimby

 

If during the course of my life I had McElroy's money, I would have been hunting 200 days or more per year!

 

Did I ever tell you how I ALMOST went on a Marco Polo hunt by accident??

 

[hunter74]

Tony yes i have been in there trophy room and it is very impressive. like i said before the bow hunter i have become is because of Corky and Cindy i have a lot of respect for both of them and value there opion to me and there tight old fashion style of family hunting. the way it should be. i am not after this award or any other to gain recognition for my accomplishments as a bow hunter to anyone but my self and those that are close to me. i have already started bolth of my kids off on there own quest and it brings me so much joy to watch and help them out on there hunts. one day i will finish it up some how or some way. to take all of Arizonas game species is something special. as you and bill have mentioned we are blessed to have such a variety of species and sub species to hunt on top of all the small game we get to chase as well. i am going to make an effort to get to Kodiak next year to finish off the deer slam and get that one out of the way and i have talked to a few friends about trying to do a full turkey slam in one spring season for the fun of it. so we will see how it goes but for now i need to get my trophy room built first so i have a place to put all my mounts. i have filled up the front room already so i believe i need to get it done ASAP. lol

[billrquimby]

Tony:

 

One "almost" Marco Polo argali hunt doesn't cut it in the rarified air of international big game hunting that some of this planet's wealthiest hunters move about in today.

 

A guy I ghostwrote a book for, a land developer whose family owns a tractor-manufacturing company, hunts Marco Polo argali four or five times a year, and has been doing so for at least fifteen or sixteen years. He isn't ready to quit until he has broken the all-time Marco Polo argali record set in the 19th century.

 

He's collected the North American 29 a couple of times, along with nearly everything that walks or crawls in Africa, Europe, South America and the South Pacific. By the time he got going in Asia, he was hung up on mountain game and proceeded to take every type of argali, urial, bharal, markhor, mouflon, wild sheep, wild goat, chamois, ibex. and high-altitude deer, bear and cat at least twice.

 

You have to pity that guy. He has no other goal left in life except to collect a ram with 73-inch horns, which probably is unattainable.

 

His trophy "room" was built by connecting three industrial-type steel buildings (it must be about 42 feet wide and 300 feet long) and paneling the inside walls. If I had to guess, he has more than 400 mounted animals in it, including a herd of big Marco Polo rams cavorting on their own mountain. Another mountain has nothing except Asian ibex and markhors.

 

I've written books for or about eleven international hunters and, with one exception, all were great guys anyone would be proud to have in their camp. If you didn't know them, you wouldn't know they were richer than King Midas.

 

That exception was the late Prince Abdorreza, crown prince of Iran, brother of its last shah, and hunting buddy of Jay Mellon, Jack O'Connor, Elgin Gates, C.J. McElroy and other 20th-century big-time hunters.

 

All I'll say is that I had to address Prince Abdorreza Pahlavi as "your highness," even though I had spent nearly 100 hours interviewing him in the two trips I made to his winter home in Florida for the book I wrote about him.

 

The interesting thing about the guys who have hired me is that the only gun nut among them was that prince. All could afford the best equipment, but only the prince had ever hunted with anything other than a factory-built rifle.

 

C.J. McElroy, for example, went to Africa for the first time with a Remington pump-action .30-06, then bought a .300 Weatherby and used it until the recoil got to him, then traded it for a 7 mm Rem Mag. His "big" rifle was a .458 Win Mag made by Sako. He successfully hunted more than 300 different types of animals all over the world with just those three rifles. I don't think he ever cleaned or oiled them, and each looked as if he had used them to dig holes and drive nails.

 

The guy could shoot though. In Zambia, after I shot the lion in my avatar, he borrowed my 7 mm Rem Mag and hit a running waterbuck three out of five times at distances past 200 yards. If I remember correctly, he was 81 years old then.

 

Bill Quimby

 

 

 

 

 

[hunter74]

Bill i might be wrong on this one but didn't the prince have the late Fred wells build a few guns for him? I know the wells family had built quiet a few full custom rigs for some very high end customers. They are good friends of mine i might have to sit down with rube and listen to some of the old stories about Fred and hunter wells. they have some of the finest built rifles i have ever seen.

[billrquimby]

My goal has always been to take the big ten with a bow and as with most hunters 2 have been a problem and that is sheep and buffalo and those are the last 2 i need to finish this feat. but i have started to take the sub species as well as far as the ones you can hunt, bill i don't mean to correct you but there is 3 species of turkey in Arizona now and i am hearing that it wont be long until a few permits will be offered to hunt them, and that is the Rio's up on the strip. I have been working on my deer slam as well as i have only one left to take and that is the sika black tails in Alaska. bow hunting in Arizona records also gives out these awards for any bow hunters out there. i have never been a person stuck on or ever entered an animal but i believe soon i will enter them all to go ahead and hope soon i will be able to accept this prestigious award in our great state of Arizona. for me the people that have pushed me to want this feat more then ever have been Corky and Cindy Richardson giving me the drive to set a lofty goal and complete it.

 

 

Congratulations on taking the various types of North American deer. Hope you get a good Sitka blacktail. I've taken desert mule deer, Rocky Mountain mule deer, Columbia black-tailed deer, and four types of white-tailed deer, plus maybe ten or more types of deer on other continents, but I never had the opportunity to hunt a Sitka blacktail and doubt that my health would allow me to hunt one now.

 

I wish you the best of luck on your hunt. Do it while you still are young.

 

Don't worry about my feelings. I like to be corrected -- that's how I am reminded how little I actually know -- but there is only one species of turkey in Arizona, Meleagris gallopavo.

 

The Rio Grande (M.g. intermedia), Merriam's (M.g. merrriami) and Gould's (M.g. mexicana) are merely subspecies of gallopavo, as are the eastern (M.g. silvestris) and Osceola (M.g. osceola) subspecies.

 

Bill Quimby

[billrquimby]

Bill i might be wrong on this one but didn't the prince have the late Fred wells build a few guns for him? I know the wells family had built quiet a few full custom rigs for some very high end customers. They are good friends of mine i might have to sit down with rube and listen to some of the old stories about Fred and hunter wells. they have some of the finest built rifles i have ever seen.

 

It's possible, but the only custom rifle maker he talked about in our interviews was Al Biesen. Jack O'Connor gave Abdorreza's wife a 7x57 mm Mauser-based rifle that Biesen made, and the prince liked it so much that he had Biesen make several for him. His wife's rifle was the first scope-sighted rifle he ever fired, and after he shot a running bushbuck (I seem to remember) with it, all of his rifles carried scopes.

 

I've not seen a Fred Wells rifle, but I'm sure they are fine guns. There are more more American makers of best-quality firearms today than ever before. Some of the prices they get -- $400,000 and up -- would be hard for me to believe if I hadn't been at the auctions.

 

I do own a Frank Wells rifle. It's a Mannlicher-style carbine, .257 Roberts caliber, built from a WWII Japanese military action. It's very accurate, and would be a great rifle except 1. it would be tough to mount a scope on it and 2. it takes too much effort to switch the safety on or off. It was a pretty thing until I nearly destroyed its stock packing it around on horses and mules when I hunted mountain lions 100 years ago. Were Fred and Frank Wells related?

 

Bill Quimby

[Outdoor Writer]

Bill,

 

I might be misremembering the sheep species, but the story is the same.

 

It happened during the big auction night at one of the last SCI conventions that was held in LV back in the 80s.

 

Jim Zumbo and I were BSing, while standing against the wall way in the back of the hall during the hunt auctions. We were both wearing our cowboy hats.

 

Whatever sheep it was, the hunt was to be the first of its kind during modern times in this particular location in Asia. The outfitter was guaranteeing a world record. And so the the bidding began and eventually climbed into the $200K+ range.

 

It was the wrong time for me to raise my hat so I could brush my hair back a bit. The auctioneer spotted that and immediately said, "And we have $XXXX from the gentleman in the back of the room with the cowboy hat. He was pointing our way.

 

Knowing we were the only two there with cowboys hats on our heads, I looked at Zumbo and asked if he had really bid. He said, "No. I think he means you." Right then, my jaw dropped, and I began wondering what I was going to tell Ellen when I got home. More importantly, I wondered where I would get that kind of money to pay for it.

 

Fortunately, someone wanted the hunt more than I did. Just as I was about to protest, a guy upped the bidding. Actually, I quickly found out that I was pretty safe; the hunt finally sold for about $100K more than my bid had been.

 

RE: McElroy

 

I met and talked to him a couple times at the old offices in Tucson. At the time (early 1970s), I was a sales rep (only writing part time) and went down there every two weeks. Ronstadt's Hardware, owned by Linda's dad, was one of my big customers. Sally Antrobus was the editor of the SCI magazine then, and she was good friend. So I would stop by SCI and take her to lunch. In fact, before Kathy (McElroy) married C.J. she was the receptionist, and I took her to lunch or dinner on occasion.

[billrquimby]

Bill,

 

I might be misremembering the sheep species, but the story is the same.

 

It happened during the big auction night at one of the last SCI conventions that was held in LV back in the 80s.

 

Jim Zumbo and I were BSing, while standing against the wall way in the back of the hall during the hunt auctions. We were both wearing our cowboy hats.

 

Whatever sheep it was, the hunt was to be the first of its kind during modern times in this particular location in Asia. The outfitter was guaranteeing a world record. And so the the bidding began and eventually climbed into the $200K+ range.

 

It was the wrong time for me to raise my hat so I could brush my hair back a bit. The auctioneer spotted that and immediately said, "And we have $XXXX from the gentleman in the back of the room with the cowboy hat. He was pointing our way.

 

Knowing we were the only two there with cowboys hats on our heads, I looked at Zumbo and asked if he had really bid. He said, "No. I think he means you." Right then, my jaw dropped, and I began wondering what I was going to tell Ellen when I got home. More importantly, I wondered where I would get that kind of money to pay for it.

 

Fortunately, someone wanted the hunt more than I did. Just as I was about to protest, a guy upped the bidding. Actually, I quickly found out that I was pretty safe; the hunt finally sold for about $100K more than my bid had been.

 

RE: McElroy

 

I met and talked to him a couple times at the old offices in Tucson. At the time (early 1970s), I was a sales rep (only writing part time) and went down there every two weeks. Ronstadt's Hardware, owned by Linda's dad, was one of my big customers. Sally Antrobus was the editor of the SCI magazine then, and she was good friend. So I would stop by SCI and take her to lunch. In fact, before Kathy (McElroy) married C.J. she was the receptionist, and I took her to lunch or dinner on occasion.

 

Tony. That must have been some sheep hunt to sell for $300,000 in the 1980s. You're lucky there was another bidder. It could have been a hunt for any of the various argalis, because all the countries with them had been closed to outside hunters for many years.

 

You brought back a flood of memories. Ronstadt's was owned by two brothers. Linda's father, Gilbert, was one of them and was a good friend. The last time I visited his home, he was trying to locate evidence that a derringer he'd acquired had been seized from Billy the Kid at a jail in New Mexico. He died before he learned if it had been. It makes me wonder what happened to that little pistol.

 

I watched Linda Ronstadt grow up. Her sister Suzi was married to my hunting partner, Alex Jacome, for many years before they divorced and each remarried.

 

Sally Antrobus is living near Houston now. She's written at least one book about Galveston and the Texas coast and I think she still produces the Houston Safari Club's magazine. Kathy indeed was the SCI receptionist until Mac married her after his first wife died. Kathy owned a high-end dress shop for a while after their divorce. The last I heard, she was living with her parents in San Carlos, Sonora.

 

I worked for and with Mac from 1983 until he died about ten years ago, and ghostwrote his last four books. (The late Gary Sitton worked on his first, McElroy Hunts Africa.) Mac had a big ego and was a controversial guy, but he was good to me.

 

Bill Quimby

 

[CouesWhitetail]

Thanks for sharing all the stories Bill and Tony....interesting stuff!!

 

[tjhunt2]

Tony.....very nice trophy room and you definitely have shot your share of game over ther years. I would love to hear some of the stories. Thanks for sharing with us.

 

Bill.......I'm still reading your book "60 Years A Hunter" and you definitely have a great book and I would recommend everyone get a copy. You are one class act Mr. Quimby. Thank you sir for signing my copy.

 

I too will write my experiences for my newphews and nieces to read someday but know it will never make it into a book. Maybe a 3 ring binder. Since shooting my first big game animal in 1976 at the age of 25, I have harvested 55 big game animals with a bow here in Az and many with a rifle. I'm now 58 and can't believe the success I've had. My wife has been very supportive over the years of my passion for hunting and she shares the passion as a hunter as well.

 

I'm envy of Mr. Quimby and Tony with all their adventures. All of mine have taken place here in arizona since I live from payday to payday. My hat is off to both you gentlemen.

 

TJ

[billrquimby]

TJ: Thank you for your kind words about my book.

 

Just remember, adventures don't always take place on the far corners of the planet. There are hunters all across America who would love to experience what we Arizonans take for granted -- the ten big game animals that launched this thread are just one example, another is the fact that 82 percent of our state is in some form of public ownership and we need only a license to go hunting.

 

Your taking five of the ten Arizona big game species during your first year of hunting in this state, and 55 big game animals with a bow since then, are accomplishments worthy of anyone's book.

 

If I'm still breathing, I would be honored to buy your first copy.

 

Bill Quimby

[tjhunt2]

TJ: Thank you for your kind words about my book.

 

Just remember, adventures don't always take place on the far corners of the planet. There are hunters all across America who would love to experience what we Arizonans take for granted -- the ten big game animals that launched this thread are just one example, another is the fact that 82 percent of our state is in some form of public ownership and we need only a license to go hunting.

 

Your taking five of the ten Arizona big game species during your first year of hunting in this state, and 55 big game animals with a bow since then, are accomplishments worthy of anyone's book.

 

If I'm still breathing, I would be honored to buy your first copy.

 

Bill Quimby

 

Thanks for the compliment Bill. It means alot coming from you. I guess I better get started on that first page.