Of all the great Pennsylvania hunting stories I’ve heard over the past decade, the story of John Shirk’s Pennsylvania State Record Elk tops them all. You may be reading the title of this post saying “I thought this was a web site about whitetail deer.” Well, it is, and it was a whitetail deer that ended up bringing an unbelievable twist of bad-luck to the story.
I first heard the name John Shirk while talking with a fellow hunter during the third week of November 2006. While sipping on a cup of coffee, he starts telling me this outrageous story… “there’s this guy named John Shirk from Goodville, Lancaster County who pulled an elk tag and then hired a guide to go up to Clinton County for the opening day of Pennsylvania’s 2006 controlled elk hunt. After being in the woods for less than a few hours, this guy shoots a state record bull elk and then he and his buddies drag this 800LB beast out of the woods and put it on a trailer. On the way home the trailer axle breaks, so they have to load the elk onto a new trailer to get back on the road. No sooner are they on the road and out runs a monster buck that smacks into the front of their van. The van flips into a ditch pinning Shirk under the wreckage. Fire crews had to come cut him out, he was eventually air lifted out of the area on a helicopter… talk about a crazy day, can you believe that?”
The answer was ‘no’ I couldn’t, and I did not believe his story, but I was intrigued. Over the next several days I started to do some searching around on the web to see if I could find anything about a guy named John Shirk shooting a state record elk in Pennsylvania. I was unsuccessful, and I ended up writing off the John Shirk story as another well told hunting story.
About a week later I picked up the Thursday morning newspaper. I always zipped straight to the sports section because a local writer did an outdoors column on Thursdays that I liked to read. My mouth dropped open as I turned the page and read the tag line “Goodville hunter bags the big one, then crushes his wrist in crash.” I read on, and sure enough, it was the story of John Shirk. I immediately jumped over to my laptop and Googled ‘John Shirk’, and this time I found what I was looking for.
While the story I first heard turned out to be a bit embellished, it was for the most part, true.
Read the original story that made the front page of North Central Pennsylvania’s ‘Endeavor News’ on November 11th, 2006 (many thanks to Endeavor News for keeping this link alive).
In 2007, John Shirk’s elk was scored by the Boone & Crockett club. Not only was the bull elk a Pennsylvania state record, it was also the seventh largest non-typical elk ever shot in North America.
John Shirk’s record elk, was put on display at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s exhibit at the Eastern Sports and Outdoors Show held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 3-11, 2007.
(This original article, found only at whitetailroundup.com™)
