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My Dealings with Kirt Darner
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My dealings with Darner by Rich LaRocco Many of you might know that I wrote both of Kirt Darner's books in the early '80s. Some of you also might know that shortly afterward evidence came into my hands that he had not killed one of his Boone and Crockett mule deer, and I turned that evidence over to Jack Reneau of the Boone and Crockett Club, which later ruled against Darner. This is a long and sorry story, and I've never written it down until now though I've been happy to share it with people who have asked. I first found out about Darner when I was senior editor at Outdoor Life Magazine (yes, I worked in Manhattan), and I was assigned to edit an article that my friend Jim Zumbo had written about the man. Darner was supposedly the most successful trophy mule deer hunter of all time and had seven bucks in the Boone and Crockett Club's record book. I also found an article that been written by Doug Knight in Field and Stream magazine in the late '60s or early '70s. The article featured a hunt that Knight had enjoyed with Darner and another young friend in a New Mexico wilderness area, where Knight reported seeing some great bucks and where Darner and his friend both killed big deer. Later, I left New York to return to the wild and free and sunny West and settled in Cache Valley, Utah. Clair Conley, editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life, asked me to stay with the magazine as Western field editor. I turned him down because the Western field editor of the time was my friend Dwight Schuh, who is now editor of Bowhunting Magazine. Clair said he was letting Dwight go, whether I took the job or not, and so I reluctantly agreed. If I had to make that decision over again, I would have turned down the job a second time, but sometimes in life you learn the hard way, and when you're hardheaded, that's how you tend to learn all your big lessons. And that is the case with the Darner story In 1982 I settled my family in Wellsville, Utah, an ideal location for my outdoor writing and editing career because it was right in the middle of some of the finest fishing and hunting country in America. Within two hours I could be hunting in Wyoming or Idaho and within a day's drive I could be fishing or hunting anywhere from California to Nebraska or Montana to New Mexico. And I took the opportunity to see the country, too, fishing or hunting in many locations and writing articles and taking photographs for Outdoor Life and several other outdoor magazines. Not long after returning to Utah I received an assignment to write a piece on Kirt Darner for North American Hunter magazine, published by the North American Hunting Club. I phoned Darner in Montrose, Colorado, and arranged an interview. He was knowledgeable and engaging. He was also willing to help me accomplish some of my hunting goals and talked about arranging for me to bowhunt elk with Wayne Carlton, a friend of his who had been having great fortune calling in elk with a unique method he had discovered. Darner was in his early 40s and had recently married for the second time. His wife, Paula, seemed genuinely interested in hunting, too, and it was obvious they enjoyed spending time together in the outdoors. My article dealt mainly with Darner's advice to other hunters who were seeking a trophy-class mule deer. I had been seeing some great bucks while bowhunting in Utah and had spent several years trying to put a bow kill on the all-time Boone and Crockett list. Each year I was seeing one to three bucks that I thought would go into the B&C book, which at the time required a net score of at least 195. So it seemed logical to me that if a guy hunted with a rifle long enough and smart enough, he could take a B&C class buck occasionally. Darner had killed seven B&C bucks though if I recall some of them had been taken when the minimum was still 190. |
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