Hunting..in Sonora
- Thread starter jerry
- Start date
Jungle Jim
Guest
Those are gonna look nice on a wall somewhere, covered with dust, Daddy Long Leg webs, gettin chewed up by Firebrats and Dermestid Beetle grubs and finally tossed into the Goodwill bin by family members who are totally clueless as to what they meant to those guys.
So Jerry, I'll tell ya a crazy tale of some trophy Big Horn Sheep racks...............
Back in the 70's in my younger days, I had amassed a collection of eleven skulls very similar in size as the one in the left side photo above. They were a mix of the four western Big Horn Sheep populations, some from the Mojave Desert, some from the southern California Coast Range, some from the Kofa Range near Yuma, some from the Tinajas Altas Range south of Yuma and some from the Pinacate Range in Sonora. I found all of them as long dead skeletal remains while tramping through the remote canyons in those desert mountains.
I was living near Indio California and had them in my back yard in a rock garden setting out of sight from anyone who wasn't deliberately snooping. I had several Desert Mule Deer skulls some Sonora Pronghorns skulls and a bunch of Desert Tortoise shells.
One morning there was a hell of a banging on my front door and I opened it only to get grabbed by throat by some form of law enforcement jerk who threw me face down on the ground and handcuffed me. There was a California Fish and Game officer in charge with a search warrant. She (it) stormed into the house with her posse behind screaming like a banshee at my wife and kids to get on the floor. The team went into the backyard to tag and take the nasty evidence, then to the kitchen refrigerator where they took and tagged anything that looked like meat.
I was hauled off the the Riverside County Jail where I spent the night awaiting a judge. The next morning they had me in shackles in front of a decent guy who heard all about the dastardly deeds that I had committed along with the "evidence" to prove such criminal activity to include an ice chest with some bags of thawing steaks, burger and chicken thighs. He asked me to explain it all and I just told him the facts, that I had picked em all up long dead and anyone could see that there was not a trace of meat or skin on the skulls and the meat from my fridge still had the labels on them from the Alpha Beta market where my wife worked. He asked the F&G bitch (it) to tell him what the big deal was and the only thing she could come up with was some obscure bit in the F&G Regs about it being unlawful to even posses a fragment of the not even then endangered sheep, pronghorns (that didn't even live in Californicata) and tortoise. He asked me if I was aware of this law and I told him no, he said that he wasn't either. He asked the F&G bitch to get me a copy of the Regs and said the that I was free to go. I asked him, what about all of my skulls and he told me to get out while the gettin's still good.
Well, it didn't take long for me to do a little snoopin and hound doggin to find out where that effen F&G bitch lived. It (she) had a mobile home in a trailer trash hangout near the Salton Sea Recreation area and did busy work screwing with people (perps) that were doing the dastardly deeds like fishing without the proper tags, over staying their camp gound permits, etc. Well, one day I cruized out there and saw her working. I took a little drive around the community just east of the campground and low and behold I found a trailer trash home with a desert rock garden with all of my Big Horn skulls displayed in full view in her front yard. I pulled my Land Cruiser into her driveway and loaded them all up. A few days later I took them all to a deserted mine shaft up in the Little San Bernardino Mountains and pitched en all in.
So there....bitch!
JJ
So Jerry, I'll tell ya a crazy tale of some trophy Big Horn Sheep racks...............
Back in the 70's in my younger days, I had amassed a collection of eleven skulls very similar in size as the one in the left side photo above. They were a mix of the four western Big Horn Sheep populations, some from the Mojave Desert, some from the southern California Coast Range, some from the Kofa Range near Yuma, some from the Tinajas Altas Range south of Yuma and some from the Pinacate Range in Sonora. I found all of them as long dead skeletal remains while tramping through the remote canyons in those desert mountains.
I was living near Indio California and had them in my back yard in a rock garden setting out of sight from anyone who wasn't deliberately snooping. I had several Desert Mule Deer skulls some Sonora Pronghorns skulls and a bunch of Desert Tortoise shells.
One morning there was a hell of a banging on my front door and I opened it only to get grabbed by throat by some form of law enforcement jerk who threw me face down on the ground and handcuffed me. There was a California Fish and Game officer in charge with a search warrant. She (it) stormed into the house with her posse behind screaming like a banshee at my wife and kids to get on the floor. The team went into the backyard to tag and take the nasty evidence, then to the kitchen refrigerator where they took and tagged anything that looked like meat.
I was hauled off the the Riverside County Jail where I spent the night awaiting a judge. The next morning they had me in shackles in front of a decent guy who heard all about the dastardly deeds that I had committed along with the "evidence" to prove such criminal activity to include an ice chest with some bags of thawing steaks, burger and chicken thighs. He asked me to explain it all and I just told him the facts, that I had picked em all up long dead and anyone could see that there was not a trace of meat or skin on the skulls and the meat from my fridge still had the labels on them from the Alpha Beta market where my wife worked. He asked the F&G bitch (it) to tell him what the big deal was and the only thing she could come up with was some obscure bit in the F&G Regs about it being unlawful to even posses a fragment of the not even then endangered sheep, pronghorns (that didn't even live in Californicata) and tortoise. He asked me if I was aware of this law and I told him no, he said that he wasn't either. He asked the F&G bitch to get me a copy of the Regs and said the that I was free to go. I asked him, what about all of my skulls and he told me to get out while the gettin's still good.
Well, it didn't take long for me to do a little snoopin and hound doggin to find out where that effen F&G bitch lived. It (she) had a mobile home in a trailer trash hangout near the Salton Sea Recreation area and did busy work screwing with people (perps) that were doing the dastardly deeds like fishing without the proper tags, over staying their camp gound permits, etc. Well, one day I cruized out there and saw her working. I took a little drive around the community just east of the campground and low and behold I found a trailer trash home with a desert rock garden with all of my Big Horn skulls displayed in full view in her front yard. I pulled my Land Cruiser into her driveway and loaded them all up. A few days later I took them all to a deserted mine shaft up in the Little San Bernardino Mountains and pitched en all in.
So there....bitch!
JJ
Jungle Jim
Guest
Never found out....
Since then I have hardly ever let anyone in my home or on my property, way too much to look at and way too many jealous do-gooders out there that will rat out anyone in a heartbeat.
I have since built up my collection way beyond those days. I have a Pinacate ram skull with a curl so huge that the tips extend above the eye sockets and it can actually roll around like a pilates ball. I found it at the bottom of MacDougal Crater fifteen years ago.
I had two border jumper human skulls that I found in the dunes west of Mohawk Dry Lake but my dogs ate them, calcium deficiency I assume.
When we cruise the desert we are always on the lookout for white objects that just might turn out to be bones, antlers or horns. When we do find even a small fragment we scour the area on foot and maybe find more or maybe not. Coyotes are really good at scattering a carcass usually in a down hill direction, so we do a little projecting and try to follow the most likely path to the original death spot. These past few dry years have really produced for us as the Palo Verdes and Ironwoods have not put on a lot of growth and the bones really stand out around their leafless and bare lower canopies. I found a small bone a few months ago and followed the trail to a long dead Ironwood and hung up in a fork was most of the carcacass of a Ring Tail that had probably been put there by a Great Horned Owl. Well, his skull now resides on a shelf next to another one that I found ten years ago.
My wife and I were just talking about the fact that in all of the years beach combing Sonora in a Jeep we have never come across a washed up human body, especially with the narco turf wars, wayward pangueros, hooka divers, etc.
JJ
Since then I have hardly ever let anyone in my home or on my property, way too much to look at and way too many jealous do-gooders out there that will rat out anyone in a heartbeat.
I have since built up my collection way beyond those days. I have a Pinacate ram skull with a curl so huge that the tips extend above the eye sockets and it can actually roll around like a pilates ball. I found it at the bottom of MacDougal Crater fifteen years ago.
I had two border jumper human skulls that I found in the dunes west of Mohawk Dry Lake but my dogs ate them, calcium deficiency I assume.
When we cruise the desert we are always on the lookout for white objects that just might turn out to be bones, antlers or horns. When we do find even a small fragment we scour the area on foot and maybe find more or maybe not. Coyotes are really good at scattering a carcass usually in a down hill direction, so we do a little projecting and try to follow the most likely path to the original death spot. These past few dry years have really produced for us as the Palo Verdes and Ironwoods have not put on a lot of growth and the bones really stand out around their leafless and bare lower canopies. I found a small bone a few months ago and followed the trail to a long dead Ironwood and hung up in a fork was most of the carcacass of a Ring Tail that had probably been put there by a Great Horned Owl. Well, his skull now resides on a shelf next to another one that I found ten years ago.
My wife and I were just talking about the fact that in all of the years beach combing Sonora in a Jeep we have never come across a washed up human body, especially with the narco turf wars, wayward pangueros, hooka divers, etc.
JJ
jerry
Guest
These cadaver dogs are amazing.The ranger at Fort Bowie and the owners brought them to my ranch and they circled a 1/4 mile area until stopping at the exact spot the ranger believes historical records point to a mass grave where 12 California miners wher ambushed by either Cochise of Mangus Colorado...the baddest man on the planet in 1862... Tied to soap trees and a few fun days of enhanced interrogation followed by being burnt slowly to death left a pile.of dead guys.They set there for two weeks then were buried in a mass grave.One dog finds heads and the other feet.....never never plant someone in the back yard! The nose knows!