Montana’s great horn rush is set to take place next Thursday, with the opening of three wildlife management areas along the Rocky Mountain Front.

The Sun River, Blackleaf and Ear Mountain areas are closed to the public during the winter to give wildlife, primarily elk, a safe place to roam while staying off of neighboring ranch land. That exclusive use means — at least theoretically — that no humans have been in the WMAs picking up the antlers that bull elk shed every year.

So when the WMAs open, it’s not unusual to see about 400 people race into the 20,000-acre Sun River WMA, the largest of the three, to search for sheds. The Blackleaf WMA is 10,400 acres, while the Ear Mountain WMA is 3,000 acres.

“It’s kind of like an Easter egg hunt for adults,” said Brent Lonner, a wildlife biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “When it opens at noon on May 15, it can be a rodeo at times.”

Bruce Auchley, a FWP spokesman, added that everyone should go to the opening of the Sun River MWA once.

“It’s kind of a circus,” he said. “It’s like the old silent movies of the great Oklahoma land rush.”

The antlers have different values for different people. Some like to collect them for fun, while others sell them to be used for furniture or they’re ground into powder and used as aphrodisiacs. What’s especially sweet is to find a matched pair, since both antlers don’t always come off at the same time.

“Most of the time one person gets one side and another person gets the other side,” recalls Roy Jacobs, a Pendroy taxidermist. “If they’re really big neither person wants to part with it, and sometimes an offer of money doesn’t even do it — but the money usually prevails.”

Years ago, the WMAs opened at midnight, with a mix of people in motorized vehicles, on horseback or on foot darting into the darkness in search of sheds. But recent concerns about the possibility of grizzly encounters prompted the switch to high noon.

“We’ve been seeing some bear activity; it’s kind of scattered and in the open areas toward the east end of the Sun River (MWA), mainly in the middle of nowhere,” Lonner said. “We encourage people that if they’re up there hiking in timbered areas or where there’s not good visibility to bring bear spray and make noise.”

People in any type of wheeled vehicles, including bicycles, need to stay on designated routes in the WMAs, but those on foot or horseback can travel cross-country.

Most of the horn hunting in the Sun River MWA takes place along the western area, where the bulls typically winter. But both Lonner and Jacobs note that antlers fall off just about anywhere, so people also have been successful toward the east.

“When they get to the point they fall off, it might be in the treed area, with the trees knocking them off, but sometimes they’re just dangling … and they might be in some of the wide open parks,” Lonner said.

An estimated 2,500 elk winter in the Sun River WMA, and Lonner said that even if people don’t find any shed antlers, chances are they’ll see some bulls and cows. Elk typicall don’t start calving until around the first part of June.

“Because of this spring and the slow green-up, the elk have been slow to move up onto their summer range,” Lonner said, adding that he hopes people will give the elk their space when horn hunting. “This is a kind of stressful time for them. They made it through a hard winter, things are just starting to green up, so we hope people will try to have as little impact on the wildlife as possible.”

Reporter Eve Byron: 447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com