Stag measuring around 350 inches is trophy from “prize” hunt
Shannon Lyndon won an all-expenses-paid hunt for New Zealand red stag in 2012, and after two years of waiting, he cashed in for a spot-and-stalk hunt on March 24.
Lyndon, who owns Lyndon’s Riverview Sports in Taylorsville, won the hunt, offered by Outtech, Inc. at the 2012 Archery Trade Association show. Lyndon’s father and a friend paid their own way and joined him on the hunt.
Lyndon killed his stag on the fourth day of the five-day hunt, taking a 19-point beast that he estimated would score at around 340 to 350 inches, with a single shot at 60 yards. He was able to take a tahr mountain goat and a ram awapawa on the hunt. His father killed a stage on the first morning of the hunt, Lyndon said, “so he could rest the rest of the trip.”
He even got to shoot a major pest for New Zealanders.
“They’re actually a nuisance in that country, the wallaby is,” Lyndon said. “They despise them. It was only like $50 to go hunt it. They want to get rid of them.”
Lyndon’s trip to New Zealand took 34 hours of flights, layovers and driving before reaching NZ Hunt, his outfitter. It was fall Down Under, and he found the weather unpredictable in a country of rolling hills with little tree cover.
“The weather was crazy. It would be 70 degrees one day and 40 the next. Raining the next, sunny the next,” Lyndon said. “It was just all crazy, but it was an awesome hunt.”
Lyndon has hunted elk several times, but he said stag were a lot harder to kill because “they never stopped moving.”
Lyndon is having a shoulder mount done for the stag for his home, but the mount of the wallaby will be at his store on US 16 a few miles north of Lake Hickory.
“I think that would be an awesome conversation piece,” Lyndon said. “You can go to the zoo and see it, but there’s just nowhere else.”
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