Darren Smith swore the dark, antlered figure he saw in the early morning hours was an elk. No one believed him.
For this project, we ask you what you want us to investigate and what stories you'd like us to tell. Darren Smith left his home in Driftwood on a dark, chilly morning in 2019.
He was heading to the airport to meet his graduate school cohort for a class trip to South America. But the drive didn’t go as planned. He was on South MoPac Expressway, close to the turnoff for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, when a hulking figure loomed ahead of him.
“I just swerved,” Smith said. “And it just stood there. It did not move, but it was huge. My heart's racing 1,000 beats a minute.
I'm like, 'What the hell was that?
'" The creature had antlers like a deer, but it was bigger, taller, seeming to tower over his car like some cryptid of the night. Burning with adrenaline, Smith pulled into the airport and announced to his classmates that he’d almost hit ... a moose.
“My main memory is just thinking Darren was nuts,” said Brian South, one of Smith’s friends from graduate school. His friends weren’t buying it. There were no moose around Austin — maybe he’d just seen one hell of a deer. But Smith knew what he’d seen was different.
After a quick Google search, he set the record straight: It was definitely an elk. But his peers remained unconvinced. Elk belonged in colder climates: the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the snowy expanses of Yellowstone. No one believed him.
Even Smith’s wife had her doubts. And the more skepticism he met with, the more the memory of the elk tormented him. He couldn’t let it go, even as weeks passed.
Then months. Then years. He was Captain Ahab; the elk, his white whale. So finally, he brought the case to ATXplained: Could we prove once and for all that wild elk roam Southwest Austin?
“I saw it for a fleeting millisecond, but in that millisecond, I saw it,” he said. “I know it’s there. ”There was one sign in Smith’s favor — what appeared to be an elk crossing sign on the State Highway 45 Southwest toll road, the connector between MoPac and FM 1626. The road opened mere months before Smith saw his creature of the night.
And the sign did not escape his notice. When an Elk Crossing sign popped up on State Highway 45 toll road, Darren Smith felt sure that it bolstered his case: there had to be elk in Southwest Austin.
“There's gotta be elk! Why would they put up these signs if there's not some kind of elk? ” Smith said. As it turned out, he wasn’t the only one intrigued by that sign.
It also aroused discussion among the good people of Some in the forum were dismissive.
“Ain’t no elk here,” one user wrote. But others told strange tales of elk roaming near the highway:"My painter took a photo of a free range herd in that area 10 years ago,” one user wrote.
“There are elk in a ranch down by the landfill,” said a third. I realized there were plenty of stories of elk in Southwest Austin for those with the eyes to see, all somewhat mythical around the edges. There was the fuzzy cellphone video posted on Reddit, as well as the questionable photo from a game camera in the Hill Country.
And then, there was my own editor,, telling me that everyone knows the elk crossing sign on 45 is about escaped elk from the Texas Disposal Systems Exotic Game Ranch. (“Everyone knowsTexas Disposal Systems operates the landfill in far Southeast Austin that accepts most of Austin’s trash. On the same property, one can lock eyes with rhinoceroses, kudus, and, yes, elk — also classified as exotics in Texas.
Odd, perhaps, that a waste management company would keep exotic animals near a landfill. But the ways of Texans are strange. There are plenty of these ranches scattered across Texas, some raking in thousands of dollars a pop from hunters hoping for a shot at the elusive elk, with its distinctive bugle and large, impressive antler rack.
“Hunters that normally would try to go to New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, to go hunt elk … they're finding it's more profitable for them to hunt them in-state,” said Calan Ahrens, who leads hunts from the open ranges of West Texas to the fenced-off exotic ranches of the Hill Country. Elk may be classified as exotic in Texas today, but they once roamed the state as natives until overhunting and habitat loss took their toll.
By the 1920s, landowners began to capture elk out of state and bring them back to West Texas. But in the Hill Country, elk are relegated to high-fenced properties that keep native wildlife out and exotics in. The thing about fences, though: they get holes. Flooding creates water gaps.
Sections of fence fall. Elk escape.
“Yeah, then you’re at the mercy of God Almighty, because then they just breed and do what they want,” Ahrens said. Forget the image of elk ranging through a snowy Yellowstone. These animals are adaptable survivors, holding up to both heat and cold. They have a flexible diet and sprawling home ranges of up to 100 square miles.
“We manage some ranches along 290 between Johnson City and Austin, and there is some elk that I've seen on camera and from survey from the helicopter,” he said. “There's even some on the north side of Austin that I've seen too. ”Apparently, the elk crossing sign on 45 was placed after several of the animals were spotted during the road’s construction. Crews reported cleaning elk carcasses from the tollway.
At the Wildflower Center, right near where Smith encountered his alleged elk, staff members shared rumors of a herd escaping from a nearby private ranch. Exactly which ranch, they couldn’t say. The road authorities, too, didn’t know where their interloping elk had come from. But they said nearby homeowners continue to report sightings.
I doggedly set out to find one — I could have taken Ahrens’ word for it, but I wanted to find cold, hard evidence in the form of camera footage. Enter Michael Ekrot, a homeowner in the Grey Rock section of Circle C, near the greenbelt. He keeps an eye out for wildlife with a game camera, capturing shots of cardinals, foxes, deer, and — yes — even elk.
In late night footage from February 2025, there they were: two big-antlered cervids trotting across the frame. I ran the footage by some experts. Calan Ahrens said yes, that's an elk in Ekrot’s video, alongside a red stag — two similar species that often intermingle. So there I had it.
Smith’s smoking gun. All there was left to do was give him the good news. I called Smith into the KUT News offices to show him the footage. After years of losing sleep, sanity and credibility with buddies, he was vindicated.
SH 45 Texas Crossing Sign Elk Sign Toll Wild Elk
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