Story By: Lainey Bennett
Every year, my siblings and I count down to tag results the same way—refreshing the Game and Fish website repeatedly, hoping luck finally breaks our way. On June 12, I checked early. The screen loaded, and there it was: I had drawn a mule deer tag. Within an hour of tag results going live, the tag was in my hand. Just like that, the season began.
The months that followed were filled with long days in the mountains with my family, glassing ridge after ridge in search of a buck worth pursuing. We turned up plenty of deer and a few respectable bucks but nothing that stopped us in our tracks
As opening day approached, I still hadn’t committed to a specific area. My mom (Diane), dad (Tracy), and twin sister (Lexi) had drawn antelope tags in Montana and headed there for opening week. My brother Landon and I stayed behind, determined to find a buck worth pursuing.
Opening morning tested us immediately. We hiked a mile into what looked like prime mule deer country, only to be greeted by relentless conditions: forty-mile-per-hour winds, temperatures climbing to eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon, and more wind as the day wore on. After all that effort, we turned up just eight deer: mostly does and a couple of small bucks.
The next morning began before daylight. As we unstrapped the side-by-side, a puddle on the trailer caught our attention. In the glow of our phone flashlights, it looked like a blown brake line (though it ended up being a broken shock). We decided to head back to town, switch to the four-wheeler, and try again that evening, but the deer remained elusive. Fog, snow, and rain rotated through the forecast over the next several days. After grinding it out, we finally took a day to regroup. By then, Landon and I had seen over a hundred deer and produced only a handful of bucks. The best of them pushed 145 inches—not what I was holding out for.
By mid-October, my mom, dad, and sister had tagged out on antelope and returned home to help. On October 16, my dad and Lexi joined me in the field for the first time. We started in a new area, and, almost immediately, I spotted a group of bucks chasing does and scraping trees. As we continued to glass, we saw some more deer, including a few respectable bucks, but I was still holding out for something special.
That evening, we returned to the canyon Landon and I had been focusing on during the previous days. We glassed patiently, spending thirty to sixty minutes behind the optics before shifting positions. As we worked back toward our starting point, my dad spotted a four-by-four with short forks. Then he paused.
“I’ve got a 200-inch buck.”
Lexi and I were skeptical at first—until the spotting scope came our way. While my dad set up the Ollin adapter to film, I checked the time—3:45 p.m.
“Let’s make a play on him,” I said. Caught up in the moment, my dad hesitated. We left Lexi on the hillside to film and started hiking to close the distance.
When we reached our shooting position, the big buck was gone. Two small bucks and seven does fed below us, but the giant had vanished. My dad climbed higher for a better angle, and that’s when I saw him—bedded with just part of his head visible. I signaled, and my dad quickly confirmed it was the buck.
At 371 yards, I lay behind the rifle, staring at the biggest mule deer I had ever seen through a scope. For the next hour, I watched him remain bedded, forcing myself to stay calm. Around 5:00 p.m., the buck stood up. He stepped into a narrow opening, no more than five feet wide. One more step forward and he would have disappeared into the trees.
The safety clicked off. I took a breath and squeezed.
The buck dropped instantly, tipping backwards into his bed. My dad’s shout of excitement echoed across the canyon. We sat and waited for a bit to be sure he was down, then we started calling my family and friends to share the news: I had just harvested the buck of a lifetime.
After a few moments, my dad asked, “So, you got to see him through the scope—do you think he’s 200 inches?”
I replied, “If he doesn’t break 200, he’s easily 190.”
We hiked down to the buck and took photos, waiting for my brother to join us. We wanted him to be a part of the moment. After about an hour and a half, Landon was finally there to be a part of it. We took some more pictures, then we finally began processing the deer. We packed him back up to the road where my mom was waiting with excitement. When we got home, a couple of our family friends who had hunted that buck the year before came by to see him. One of them had drawn the same tag and planned to target him again this year. We’d had no idea where my buck was living and hadn’t even known he was there—he had simply been in the area where we usually mule deer hunt. I had taken a buck just three quarters of a mile down the same draw back in 2021.
We pulled out the tape and started measuring. His left side was 86 7/8", and his right side measured 92 6/8". On his right antler, he had an 11 1/8" inline and a 5 7/8" eye guard, with a few extra points near the base. His left side had another inline and some extras at the base as well. He also had a bunch of little stickers everywhere. When we finished measuring, the final gross score was 200 6/8".
After three mule deer tags—and two bucks in the 180" class—I finally joined the 200" club. More than the score, it was the shared effort, the patience, and the family behind the hunt that made it unforgettable.