Gunnison
Maybe you have an empty space in your house, a certain nook or cranny that needs a little flair and begs for a lovely decorative piece.
Perhaps a hand-forged antique copper bucket from Newfoundland filled with brilliant crimson ginger flowers. Or a simply darling accent table made of tightly woven Indonesian sea grass. If you do, well, you might want to skip over this story.
But if that special place in your home cries out for a snarling, stuffed wolverine (price tag: $1,295), you need to talk to Randy Clark.
Or let’s say you have a larger room, one with vaulted ceilings that won’t really be complete until it has a 10-foot-tall, 1,400-pound (when it was still running around in the woods) mounted grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs.
Or you’re a guy, your wife is out of town for a few days and you want to surprise her by getting rid of that stupid dining room table that no one ever uses. You can fill that space with a full-body mount of a mule deer that has a mountain lion on its back and, as you might imagine, quite the startled look on its face.
As will your wife when she gets home.
For any of that, Clark is your guy. He owns Traders Rendezvous, an eye-opening shop containing some 350 former animals that now require little more than occasional dusting. His mounted-animal store – one of the largest in the country – is nestled along the main street in this Old West town, among restaurants, general stores and the many souvenir shops that offer more placid gifts. Although, frankly, why would anyone settle for a T-shirt or a Colorado coffee mug when they could buy a dead Arctic fox?
“People buy these pieces like they’d buy a painting or a sculpture,” said Clark. “It’s decoration.”
And his customers, he said, are not hunters.
“About 90 percent of the people I sell to don’t hunt or even own a gun,” said Clark, who does both. “No real hunter would display an animal they personally didn’t shoot.”
The store has been in the same spot along Tomichi Avenue, which is also U.S. 50, for 18 years now. But Clark has sold the mounted animals, animal heads, and antlers from deer and elk for 25 years.
Today, Clark and his wife, Ellen, are celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary.
She definitely knew what she was getting into.
“When we were first dating, he took me back to his trailer,” Ellen said, before she was interrupted by her husband. “It was,” he said, “a mobile home.”
“Whatever,” said Ellen. “He took me back there and, inside, mounted on the walls, were an elk head, a bighorn sheep head and a mule deer head. It had those low, you know, trailer ceilings, and you had to duck under the elk head to sit on the couch.”
Randy Clark bought what was a souvenir and gun shop from his father, Harold, who ran that business for decades. Now, during the busy summer months, Harold is behind the cash register five or six days a week.
“It used to be a father-son business,” said Harold. “Now it’s a son-father business.”
And what a business it is. If you want that 10-foot-tall grizzly bear, for example, it’ll cost you between $12,000 and $14,000. Randy Clark isn’t sure about the price because officially it’s not for sale.
“That bear brings people into the store,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell it. But it’s a business, and if someone really wanted it … ”
The mounts come from people who no longer want them. Widows, for example.
“A lot of my sellers are women whose husbands hunted, had the heads mounted and have now died,” Clark said. “Some of the women sell the heads as soon as they can.”
Back to the question of who are his customers. Clark said the answer lies about 30 miles to the north: Crested Butte. There, in the one-time coal and silver mining town that now mostly mines the wallets of tourists and skiers, homes costing $4 million and more dot the lush green hillsides.
“They want these trophy animals in their trophy homes,” Clark said. “They build them with 20- and 30-foot ceilings, and with the Western heritage and all, trophy mounts fit in quite well.”
“It’s the Western way of life,” said Ellen Clark. “Hunting is what this part of the country is about. Some people come into the store and see dead animals. I see beautiful, three-dimensional art.”
The whole American West thing is, of course, lost on some. Take tourist Sarah Curtis of Norfolk, England, who walked through the store last week.
“We don’t have things like this mounted on our walls back home,” she said. “Big animal heads, well, that’s just for the gentry.”
Curtis was visiting friend and Gunnison resident Arvena Vader, who grew up in a family of hunters in the deer- and elk-rich landscape around the town. Among the more avid big-game hunters is her mother.
“When I’m walking in the woods out here,” said Curtis, “and I see a deer or an elk, I wave my arms and yell, ‘Run and hide before Arvena’s mother shoots you.”‘
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
