Never seen a buck near Bundyville……. I need better skills…….
So I was doing a google search for Ted Riggs & it told me he had been mentioned on MM. As it turned out, that mention was a message posted by someone in Feb. 2012 that contained this excerpt/sidebar from my article about the Strip that I had cited. The complete article also told the tale about a hunter's big buck.
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The Arizona Strip is a relatively narrow chunk of country that is isolated from the rest of the state by the Colorado River. From the river, the Strip goes north to the border of southern Utah, from east to west, it goes from the Lake Powell to the southeast corner of Nevada. Although the North Kaibab sits within this area, a reference to the Strip normally means the other three hunting units. The terrain in these units -- 12B, 13A and 13B -- consists of a mix of high desert, big canyons and the forested slopes of Mt. Trumbull, Mt. Emma and Mt. Logan, all of which rise more than 7,000 feet. They also contain areas as remote and wild as any in Arizona.
Among the world’s trophy hunters, it has a lofty reputation. Over a span of about 20 years, the Strip produced some of the best mule deer hunting in the West, and many of the bucks grew to record-book size. In fact, the trophy record book published by the Arizona Wildlife Federation still lists more than 30 typical and non-typical bucks from the Arizona Strip that were killed from the mid-1950s into the early 1980s.
The history of the Strip prior to the early 1900s is somewhat murky, however. We know the Mormons used timber from Mt. Trumbull to build a temple in St. George, Utah. We also know good populations of pronghorn antelope and desert bighorn sheep inhabited the Strip because local cattle baron Preston Nutter proposed that it be turned into a big-game refuge. Nothing ever came of it, though. And supposedly, Teddy Roosevelt brought a herd of gazelle from Africa and turned them loose somewhere on the Strip. Nobody knows what happened to them either.
Unlike the Kaibab, where the mule deer had been a mainstay back into the 19th century, the Strip herd has a much more recent history.
When the first settlers arrived and created Bundyville in the early 1900s, the area was nothing but dry sagebrush flats and pinyon-juniper forests, and about the only water available was on Mt. Trumbull. Some written accounts by those living on the Strip back then make it clear that seeing a deer was a rarity. For the most part, much of the land was marginal deer habitat anyway. The lack of water didn’t help. As more ranchers began grazing their charges on the Strip, however, they built dozens of stock tanks to ensnare free-running water for the cattle and sheep.
In 1947, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assigned Ted Riggs to the area as a predator control trapper. Using both traps and poison, Riggs made a serious dent in the coyote and lion populations. Then the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which controls the majority of land on the Strip, moved in during the early 1950s to improve the grazing habitat. With a heavy steel chain stretched between them, bulldozers “chained” down entire stands of juniper and pinyon trees. They used this clearing technique on acres and acres of range.
New forage plants started growing almost immediately, and so did the deer herd. Within a few years, the steady supply of water, increased browse and low predation helped the deer herd grow huge, even to the point where it threatened to overrun the available habitat. The Strip became a productive deer factory.
By the mid-1950s, hunters in Arizona learned about the excellent hunting and trophy-producing ability. Nearly anyone who wanted to venture into the remote area and endure hours of bumpy, dusty roads could tag a buck. If they had the patience and willpower to pass up the smaller ones, they had a very good chance at an outstanding trophy. Because the soil in the area mirrors the same mineral-rich type as that on the North Kaibab, antler growth was sometimes spectacular, with spreads often going well beyond 30 inches. Place names within the Strip such as Poverty Mountain, Mt. Dellenbaugh, Snap Point, Trumbull, Black Rock, Wolfhole and Seegmiller became well known for their big buck production.
At an old-line shack near Grassy Mountain, the graffiti-covered walls tell some of the story. In 1966, a local cowboy, Garn Esplin, scribbled, “Saw 40-50 deer in the past two days.” Farther down the wall, in March 1963 ranch foreman Mel Wipple wrote, “What’s the matter with the deer hunters? There’s 10,000 deer here by the look of things.”
Even Riggs saw what was happening. In 1956, he rode his horse from the Wildcat Ranch to Snap Point. On the way, he counted deer; his one-day tally totaled 346 of them. More than half of them had antlers, and half of the bucks were four points or more.
Not surprisingly, three of the notable entries in the Arizona record book have Riggs listed as the hunter. His typical entry from 1968 scored 189. His two non-typicals scored 249 6/8 and 240 2/8. His last Strip deer, taken in 1988, was an 8x9 with double eyeguards.
Sadly, sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Strip no longer harbored a lot of deer. A lot of finger pointing occurred, but for the most part, the downward population trend happened because of several factors.
Worried about a repeat of the now infamous debacle where thousands of deer starved on the North Kaibab in the 1920s, the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AGFD) liberalized the seasons and also issued a large number of doe permits. Then in 1972, President Richard Nixon banned the canid poison, Compound 10-80 for use on federal land. This move took away Riggs’ most effective predator control. About the same time the coyote population started to grow again, the AGFD gave the mountain lion the status of a big-game animal, thus creating the need for a special tag and an annual limit of one lion per hunter. Finally, the drought that has plagued the state for the last 12-15 years arrived.
Together, these factors resulted in a dramatic drop in the total deer population. The game department estimated the population of deer on the Strip was less than 5,000 during the 1970s, and by the 1990s, it had fallen to about 2,400 or less.
At one time, the Strip country west of the North Kaibab comprised a single hunt unit. After the deer numbers started to plummet, however, the game department split the unit into 13 A and 13B for management purposes. The split effectively separated the deer populations around the Mt. Trumbull-Mt. Logan area from those in the Virgin Mountain, Black Rocks and Mudd Mountain area........................