SUN RIVER WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA -- Mark Schlepp strode to the gate at high noon Thursday and with a sly grin asked the question the hundreds of folks gathered at the gate wanted to hear: "You wanna go?"

The crowd answered with whoops, whinnies and the firing up of diesels as Schlepp, Sun River Wildlife Management Area manager, opened the state lands for the summer, to the delight of about 350 horn-hunters.

Within moments, the staging area at Swayze Lake was drained of the mass of motorcycles, minivans, all-terrain vehicles, trucks, horses, dogs, toddlers, grandparents, cowboys and conservationists who started gathering here last Saturday hoping to find antlers shed by some of the 2,600 elk last winter in the Sun River WMA.

The hunters employed different strategies. Tom Davidson of Stockett has hunted horns here for about 25 years, and recalls when it was just he and five friends.

"I'm the first one of out the gate every year," he said proudly, his sturdy, dapple gray horse next to him at the gate for horses and human hoofers. "I go to my hot spots, the different bedding grounds where the bulls lose their horns when they bed down.

"The best I've ever done was get a pickup-box full."

Nick Giard of Bozeman had a different tactic. He's been coming here since 1988 with his dad, Jason Giard. They parked a pickup here Saturday, and were second in line at the motorized vehicle gate.

They planned to pile about five or six buddies into the back of the truck, drive into the WA and hop out wherever somebody thought was a good place to start.

"I found an 11-pound horn one year," Nick Giard said. "And we had one guy who found two matched sets of 13-pound horns. Some years people get tons, some years not so many. Hopefully it's a good year."

Don Wood and Dick Somers left the Flathead Lake area about 4 a.m. Thursday, but only managed to be 46th in the line of about 270 rigs. It was Woods' fourth horn-hunting expedition, but Somers was "a newbie" -- or as some like to say, "a Sun River horn-hunting virgin." They didn't really have much of a plan of attack, other than to get out on the ground and have a good time outside.

Schlepp said that Thursday's opening also served a purpose for wildlife-area managers, because the human activity pushes calving cow elk into the higher country, where they'll stay for most of the summer. If they calve low, they stay low and eat up precious winter-grazing fodder.

The odds of finding shed antlers is better today than in previous years, many of the hunters noted, since the price has dropped from about $15 to $18 a pound down to $3 or $4. That's driven out most of those horn-hunting for profit. Instead, most of those gathered here today say they don't sell the sheds; they're tossed into ever-growing piles as a type of tribute to the big bucks.

Still, stories abound about that one special rack that fetches the big bucks.

"Last year, one guy was chasing after his two little kids who ran past the biggest set I've seen of massive nontypical antlers," Davidson recalled. "A guy offered him ten grand for them, but the dad didn't take it.

"I wouldn't have either. You can hunt forever and you'd never find something like that again. It's like my grandpa said -- once you sell it, you can't get it back."

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