Shane Sanderson first saw the giant last July in a hayfield on his Fremont Co. cattle ranch. He was in a bachelor group with 2 other bucks, a good 8-pointer and another nice 10, but this buck with 10 tall points and long brows was seemingly from another world.

“You just don’t see whitetails that size in Wyoming,” Shane told Realtree.com.

Shane watched and patterned the bucks for a month, and set a ground blind in the corner of the field where the bucks were popping out most evenings. On September 1, the bow opener, the monster 10 showed up like clockwork with some other deer, and Shane killed him at 35 yards.

Shane reports that over the years he has shot some whitetail bucks in the 130- to 140-class, which is a very typical trophy for Wyoming. He’d always wanted to kill a velvet rack, and this was his first one.

Now the dilemma: Let the velvet dry and strip it, so the buck could be entered into the record book as the new state record? He decided to do it, and I think that was smart. The giant, which scored 170 3/8, deserves to be recognized as the exceptional trophy that it is.

I predict it will be decades before a Wyoming hunter shoots a typical bigger than the Sanderson Buck, and quite possibly this record might never be broken.