It was the kind of buck that makes grown men whisper. The kind that features a pair of light-brown antlers still in velvet sprouting from a pair of heavy bases that swept wide enough to cast their own shadow. The animal's headgear was unique to say the least. Despite not having the traditional 10-point+ crown, his expansive spread was enough to capture the attention of both local residents and one man who couldn’t resist an easy shot.
In the high country of Inyo County, California, a tag for a deer like that is a once-in-a-decade lottery ticket. In the manicured cul-de-sacs of Yosemite Lakes Park—a gated golf community an hour south of Yosemite National Park—deer like that are said to simply wander onto the 7th fairway at dawn.
It is within the contrast of these two very different locations in which this story takes place.
In September 2023, a warden from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife walked into a taxidermy shop in Coarsegold for what should have been a routine paperwork check. As the warden and the shop owner swung open doors, shoulder mounts lined the walls, and there—under the fluorescent lights—was the wide-racked deer that seemingly everyone in eastern Madera County had been talking about for weeks. The tag wired to its antler read “A19 Archery / X10 – Inyo Zone.” Harvest date: late August. Location: a ridge above Lone Pine, 120 miles and two mountain ranges away.
Instantly drawn to the unique shape of the deer’s antlers, the warden’s memory was suddenly jogged as he recalled seeing that very same and very unique deer alive just three days earlier. But as he recalled, it wasn’t 100 miles away on some lonesome mountain range in Inyo County - it was on a homeowner’s trailcam. Eating roses. In Yosemite Lakes Park.
The infamous rack | CDFW
What followed was one of the cleanest, most satisfying poaching busts in recent California history.
The buck’s final hours were documented better than most Netflix true-crime subjects. Motion-activated cameras caught him strolling past mailboxes at 5:47 a.m. Cell-phone photos, which were later recovered under search warrant, showed him bedded under a cedar tree in the (you guessed it) shooter’s own backyard at 7:12 a.m. By lunchtime, old wide-rack was dead, by nightfall he was in the bed of a pickup, and by the time the next weekend rolled around, his head was in a taxidermist’s cooler with a tag claiming he’d fallen to an arrow somewhere near Mount Whitney.
The lie was creative, almost elegant. Yosemite Lakes Park sits in the D5 deer zone, where tags are plentiful and trophies are modest. The Inyo zones, by contrast, are the stuff of magazine covers. Use a leftover high-country tag on a golf-course buck and you get the glory without the 10-mile pack-out. All you have to do is convince the taxidermist—and the state of California—that a deer teleported across the Sierra Nevada in rush-hour traffic.
Taxidermists, as it turns out, are the unsung gatekeepers of ethical hunting. California law requires every set of antlers to carry the tag under which the animal was legally taken. Most shops photograph the tag with the mount. A few, like the one in Coarsegold, keep a logbook that wardens flip through the way detectives used to spin the precinct’s Rolodex.
One look at the logbook, one glance at the Facebook group “Yosemite Lakes Deer Pics,” and the case was over before it started.
In September 2025, the tag holder stood up in Madera County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts including unlawful take of a mammal and falsifying a government document. The sentence wasn’t an absolute hammering, but was still something of a masterpiece of quiet humiliation. For his role in the illegal killing of the backyard buck, he was handed a three year hunting suspension in California and other cooperating states. He also received one year of supervised probation, eighty hours of community service, and was mandated to re-certification in a state-sanctioned hunter education course.
And finally, the forfeiture of the mount itself. The expansively unique trophy that was supposed to hang over his mantle for the rest of his life now belongs to the People of the State of California.
The warden who broke the case put it bluntly: “He didn’t just poach a deer. He tried to poach a story.”
Don’t be that guy.
