Brooks Talks About Hunting His Pending World-Record Kittitas County Bull Elk

“I want to get the story out there. I want people to know what really happened.”

So states Washington bowhunter Casey Brooks during a two-hour interview with friendly podcaster and fellow elk-ophile Cameron Hanes in finally breaking his silence on his remarkable 2024 raffle tag hunt that sparked innuendo, photoshopping and a brief game warden investigation that found “no violations,” as well as the pending world-record Rocky Mountain bull.

Brooks, 59, and who lives in La Center near Vancouver, also detailed the pursuit of the Kittitas County giant in an Outdoor Life article out yesterday.

His trophy was measured by Pope & Young scorers at last week’s Central Oregon Sportsmen’s Show in Redmond, and it tallied 482 4/8 inches net and 491 6/8 inches gross. Two more scorings are needed to make it official, per OL. It was Brooks’ 12th bull of more than 400 inches and 86th elk overall.

The long and the short of the story is that after his buddies found the bull’s sheds in 2024 and he drew the $7 raffle tag, Brooks said he hunted the animal on public land in its thick, brushy, almost-blacktail-like mountaintop habitat last September, October and November – his tag was good from September 1-December 31 – until a mountain lion may have run it out of the area to another public-land spot.

Following a mid-December collision with a snowplow that left Brooks with an injured shoulder and wrist and which made drawing his bow “excruciating” and left his aim slightly left and limited his range, he and buddies eventually found very large elk tracks and surmised the animal had crossed onto private land.

Speculative “cold-calling” finally yielded Brooks permission from a landowner to hunt their woodlot, but when he arrived December 29, a neighbor who had been feeding a large bull that had arrived in recent weeks confronted him about his plans, requiring a little subterfuge.

Using an ice fishing shelter and the legal Washington maximum of 10 gallons worth of apples and alfalfa, Brooks set up on the property, sat all day on the 30th without seeing anything, and sat again all day on the 31st until late in the afternoon when the elk popped up at 23 yards.

In sharing his story, Brooks counters the narrative that he’d shot a “driveway elk,” that it somehow hadn’t been a worthy hunt. Someone, who knows who, went so far as to photoshop houses into the background of one of his images taken with the bull.

Brooks actually compliments their computer skills on the podcast, and while it’s true there were houses in the area where the elk was ultimately killed – a close reading of OL’s piece will allow you to pinpoint the location – the story makes clear that the hunt was far from a singular lucky moment as hunting light began to fade New Year’s Eve.

While the Outdoor Life article details the nuts, bolts and nuances of Brooks’ hunt, Hanes’ podcast also delivers a lot of usable tips, tactics and wapiti observations from “the king of elk hunting” and is well worth a listen.

And that is going to have to be all the time I have for this.