Elk naturally shed their antlers, which can weigh as much as 40 pounds, each spring. People then pick them up and sell them, and it’s a big business year-round, but the market particularly shines in the spring in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
On a recent Saturday, the town square — flanked with permanent elk antler arches — was buzzing. It was the world’s largest annual auction for elk antlers.
Local kids paraded antlers that were twice their size. The auctioneer babbled to hundreds in the crowd. Prices edged into the thousands.
This was the flashy public-facing event of the weekend, with a lot of tourists buying a piece of the West for their living room mantle.
But off on the side streets, there was an informal parking-lot economy of sorts. Lots of Carhartt jackets, camo ball caps and clanking antlers.
Mike Bosworth dragged heaping piles of antlers from his old truck bed.
“I found most of these,” Bosworth said. “I’m an addict,” he chuckled.
Every spring, Bosworth scours mountain foothills and forests of his Oregon home looking for antlers.
“I’m just an outdoor guy,” he said. “You start finding them, and it's like an Easter egg hunt for an adult.”
Like, a 12-miles-a-day type of hunt. But this year he is hiking farther for antlers.
“They're all in different places. They're scattered,” Bosworth said.
A little context on elk migration: The animals go wherever there is the least snow because they need grass to eat. Normally when they shed their antlers, they are still in low-lying, easy-to-hike to places. But with such little snow in the West this year, a lot of the elk — and their antlers — were deep in the mountains.
“I had to walk so much farther,” Bosworth said. So he is cashing in to make his hobby worth it this year.
