The Boone and Crockett Club announced the certification of a new world record for Roosevelt elk on Tuesday. California hunting guide Tim Carpenter killed the record bull in northern California in September 2023, and he submitted the skull to the organization for record consideration in February.
At that time, B&C scorers had given Carpenter’s bull an initial score of 439 7/8 inches. This was well over the standing world record held by Rick Bailey, who in 2015 killed a Roosevelt bull in British Columbia that scored 419 6/8. But before Carpenter’s record could be made official, the B&C Club required that the score be confirmed by an Awards Program Judge’s Panel. B&C follows this protocol for all pending world-record animals, and the panel wasn’t slated to convene until April 2025.
B&C confirms with Outdoor Life that the Club recently convened a Special Judge’s Panel in Verdi, Nevada, at Carpenter’s discretion, to verify the bull’s entry score. This involved two separate teams of B&C measurers, who re-scored Carpenter’s bull and adjusted its official score from 439 7/8 to 455 2/8.
“The main objective of any panel, whether it be a Special Judges Panel or Awards Judges Panel, is to confirm the accepted entry score,” B&C’s director of big game records Kyle Lehr explained in a press release. “Sometimes differences in measurements are discovered through this process, and corrections need to be made. In the case of Mr. Carpenter’s Roosevelt elk, those differences resulted in an increase in score.”
Feb. 8, 2024: The Boone and Crockett Club announced on Wednesday that a giant Roosevelt elk killed by Tim Carpenter in northern California in 2023 could be a new world record. The skull is awaiting confirmation by a judge’s panel, which will determine whether it’s crowned the new No. 1 Roosevelt bull in the B&C book. Although the panel won’t convene until April 2025, the new record seems likely at this point. The bull’s preliminary score of 439 7/8 inches is well over the current world record, which Rick Bailey holds with a bull from British Columbia that scored 419 6/8 in 2015.
As the B&C Club says in a press release, Carpenter is “no stranger to big elk.” He’s taken several other record bulls, and he already holds the archery world record for Roosevelt elk with a bull that he killed in 2011 and scored 398 1/8, according to the Pope & Young Club. This means if Carpenter’s most recent bull holds up to the scrutiny of the B&C Special Judge’s Panel next April, he’ll have the No. 1 Roosevelt bulls in both books.
And those are just the bulls that Carpenter has harvested himself. When he’s not working as a wildlife biologist in northern California, he guides elk hunts in the area, and he’s had success putting clients on other notable animals over the years. This includes the new P&Y world-record velvet Roosevelt elk that hunter Chris Krampe killed on Aug. 4, 2023. Krampe’s bull scored 324 2/8 inches, which was more than 76 inches over the previous world record. As Krampe explained to P&Y in December, Carpenter was the guide on that hunt as well.
“We had already put a stalk on two giant bulls that my guide, Tim Carpenter, had mentioned would have probably both been a world record,” Krampe said, referring to their August 2023 hunt. “Honestly, I thought he was joking with all the ‘new world record’ talk, but he ensured me that he was being serious about it being a chart-topping bull. Carpenter was very familiar with the bull that was the current world record because he guided the hunter that had killed him as well. Carpenter has a history of getting on giant Roosevelt elk, and this bull was very special to say the least.”
Carpenter killed his pending world-record Roosevelt bull on Sept. 21, a little over a month after putting Krampe on his own world-record elk. Both bulls were taken in Humboldt County, which lies on the northern coast closer to Oregon. (Any elk taken south of the Humboldt County line are classified as Tule elk, according to the boundaries set by B&C.)
Read Next: Oregon Bowhunter Arrows New State-Record Cascade Roosevelt Bull
Carpenter was not available for comment on Wednesday, and the details behind his September hunt are slim. But he told B&C that he estimated the elk’s age around 11 or 12 years old. He added that it wasn’t as big in the body as some of the other record-book bulls he’s put his hands on.
“You’d think that packing around antlers like that, it would be beefier,” Carpenter said. “The elk’s body was the average size of a mature Roosevelt bull, and his antlers still dwarfed his body. It was probably from a combination of great genetics, perfect environmental conditions, and lots of late rain providing great forage for finishing out antler growth.”
