North Dakota Hunter Drops 394-Inch Badlands Bull on State Land

Austin Streifel opened North Dakota’s 2026 elk season with a Badlands bull that reportedly green grossed just under 400 inches. The 27-year-old took the giant on state land, hunting alongside his wife and a close friend, he told Field & Stream.

A Tag 15 Years in the Making

Streifel had been applying for a North Dakota elk tag since he was 12. His odds of drawing this one came in at less than 1 percent, and the state doesn’t award preference points to longtime applicants the way other states do.

“I was shaking so bad with excitement when I saw the results back in April that I couldn’t even text my dad to tell him I’d drawn the tag,” he said.

The tag was originally good for E4, a Badlands unit bordering Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The region’s elk were all but gone by the late 1800s, and the animals disappeared from North Dakota entirely until the National Park Service reintroduced them in 1985, turning out 47 head — 8 bulls and 39 cows — in the park’s south unit. That nucleus climbed past 1,000 animals, pushing out onto adjacent state and private ground. Roosevelt himself had lamented the loss more than a century earlier, writing in his 1888 book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail that “the stately and splendid deer, the lordliest of its kind throughout the world, is now fast vanishing.”

Passing on a 360 for the Real Giant

Streifel put in close to 50 hours glassing in the field on top of 30 hours of e-scouting. On day two, he passed a bull he estimated at 360 inches from just 200 yards. His wife thought he was crazy.

The gamble paid off when his friend turned up a bigger bull in E3. Once the season’s opening days are behind them, E4 tag holders are cleared to hunt the larger E3 unit as well.

“Its fronts and its tops were giant,” Streifel said. “We’re talking 24-inch eye guards.”

The Shot

He left Fargo at 1:30 a.m. on September 11 and hiked 2.5 miles in with his wife and friend. The trio crawled 100 yards to a knob and settled at 508 yards — farther than Streifel says he’s ever shot at game.

Shooting a 7mm PRC, he placed his first round behind the shoulder, just over the heart, and sent a second shot to follow it. The bull covered 20 steps and bedded down.

The symmetrical 6×6 carries a 37-inch spread and main beams well over 50 inches. Streifel says it green grossed 394 inches, with an expected net around 387.

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