Now, when it’s not traveling the country as a display, it sits in Crested Butte’s Chamber of Commerce downtown. It sat in a hardware store that’s just about as old as the rack. After touring about, the elk ended back in Crested Butte in 1971. In 1961, it was made official in New York City as the number one bull in the world. It was finally measured by an official scorer. The rack was loaned out, stuck in storage, and returned. The Rozman brothers inherited the saloon in question in 1948 along with the antlers. Then in 1915, as legend has it, Plute gave the rack to a bar owner to pay his tab. He told others about the size of his elk, and to prove it, he eventually went back in to pack out the antlers. He didn’t typically haul out the racks as it was tough to pay rent with something that useless back in those days. One day in 1899, he went up to Dark Canyon, 12 miles west of Crested Butte and killed a fine bull, a mighty fine bull. He lived in a boarding house, occasionally trading wild game meat for rent. Legend has it that John Plute, 31, was a miner around Crested Butte, Colorado - as most able-bodied men from the region were. Nearly 20 years ago, OL outdoor writer Jim Zumbo struck out to see and hear about what was then the world’s largest elk. State: CO When elk are killed a good century back, details of the hunt tend to get fuzzy. When Ellsworth and an official measurer put a tape to it, the score, along with proof of a fair chase hunt, proved that this elk was, and still is, the typical world record. The elk was given to his sister, who Ellsworth ended up following into that parking lot in 1995. Winters died in August 1994, the day before his 77th birthday. Even though the rack was stored in a garage for years, Winters would show it off every chance he got. Winters shot the bull with his Savage Model 99. In the fall of 1968, Winters and his friend spotted this bull in the White Mountains near the Black River. Ellsworth traced the story of the hunt to the previous owner’s brother, Alonzo Winters–a deceased cattle-rancher from Arizona. When the truck turned into a local restaurant, Ellsworth was feeling a little hungry himself and ended up buying the rack from its owner. Even so, Ellsworth pulled onto Main Street behind the truck and knew it was a 420-something rack. But the elk he saw in the back of that pick-up was old and faded.

Ellsworth is an antler buyer who grew up in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona - a place that has now become synonymous with giant, record-book bulls. For antler buyer Alan Ellsworth, that’s what he saw February, 28 1995. What isn’t all that common is to see a world record rack thrown in with a washer and dryer set, stopped at a traffic light. State: AZ In hunting towns, it’s not uncommon to see a good-sized elk rack and four hooves sticking out of the back of a pick-up in hunting season.

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