Darian Villalobos and Alex Hammans talk about recent Elk Rescue 

By on Monday, March 31st, 2025 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News

BAKER COUNTY – Recently two Baker City men shared a video on social media of rescuing a bull elk that had become tangled in a fence. That video quickly went viral, reaching nearly half a million views on Elkhorn Media Group assets alone.


Since then, both men, Darian Villalobos and Alex Hammans (DV/AH) have spoken with Elkhorn Media Group (EMG) staff about this experience.

The video can be found at https://www.facebook.com/ElkhornMediaGroup/videos/4021763974725881


(EMG) Thank you both for speaking with me and of course for sharing this awesome video with us. Let’s start with a quick introduction from each of you and have you each share a little about yourself.

(DV) My name is Darian Villalobos, I’m from Baker City, I was born and raised here, grew up here my whole life. I love being outdoors. I try to be in the outdoors any second that I can. I work out at Marvin’s, so I only work four 10s and spend as much time as I can out in the woods.

(AH) Hey, I’m Alex Hammans. I was born in Portland, and I moved over here to Baker during high school and I kind of grew up here. I work at CB Construction right now and I’m traveling so, usually whenever I can, I’m out there in the woods too, trying to poke around and find horns or pushing animals.

(EMG) Let’s talk a little bit about that day, what were you guys out doing and how did you stumble upon this elk that was stuck in the fence?

(AH) I think we left at like 7:00 am, I called and asked him if he wanted to go out and hike around in the woods, so I picked him up and we went out to one of our spots and we had hiked like 6 miles.

(DV) It just happened to be one of those days where I wasn’t really planning on doing anything, I didn’t have any plans to do much, but I woke up to the phone call for my buddy [Alex] saying, hey, let’s go look for some horns and let’s go do something. So, we took it upon ourselves to go see what was out and about in nature. We walked around for probably a good 6 miles. And we’re just walking around looking for horns, you know, doing what we like to do.


(AH) We were walking around, and we had picked up a few and I actually had to go back to town, because we were getting a puppy. We were heading to town and that is when we saw the big bull, we were in awe about it so we were sitting there watching him.


(DV) So we were just driving down the road and I looked over to my right and he [Bull Elk] was standing right next to the fence when I first saw him. Just the sheer size of him, he stood out. He went to jump the fence down into the river right there. We had watched him try to jump it, but he didn’t make it all the way over. And the second that we saw him get all tangled up in the fence we knew that he was going to be stuck. As any rifle hunter would do, I mean, I think in my head, would have saved the animal regardless of what it was. Yeah, it was a little bit scary at that point because, you know, you don’t know if he’s going to break loose from the fence, and he’s going to go the berserk or if he is going to catch you with one of those horns or something crazy, but it was just one of those things where I would rather risk my life to save him then let him suffer there and die in a cruel way like that. So, we just took it upon ourselves. We didn’t have any of the tools to get hm out, we weren’t really prepared for the situation like that. I’ve told everybody that’s asked me about it, it’s not something I ever thought I would do in my lifetime or ever experience in my lifetime.


A lot of people have talked about damaging the fence and stuff, but we really didn’t do a whole lot. We just kind of shimmied him from the fence and he kind of broke himself loose and he looked like he was all right when we got him loose.
If he had been hurt in any way, we would have just had to call Oregon State Police.


(AH) I am a framer so I didn’t really have too much in my truck at the time, but I had a hammer, luckily. I went down there and got him out, I thought I was going to hurt myself more than I was going to hurt him. I was just kind of like in autopilot doing it. I didn’t know really what I was doing at the time.
Like Darian said, with the people’s fence, I’ve built a few fences, it’s nothing really to put a few pieces of barbed wire back up just to save a life you know.


(DV) Definitely worth it.


(AH) Yeah, definitely worth a few pieces of barbed wire.


(EMG) There was a point where the elk had gotten up and he had kind of went towards the river and he turned back and looked at you guys. It looks like he turned around to thank you guys. What was that like to see him stop, look at you almost acknowledging what you guys had done?


(AH) I mean literally the only thing that I could say, I just said thank you back.


(DV) For me, it is hard because I wasn’t anticipating our video going viral on the internet. So, I wasn’t worried about watching what I was saying. I was just in complete awe, with my buddy, at the moment. The number one comment is, he just turned around and acknowledged us like, you know, we had rescued him and saved his life. And so, it’s definitely something that that you look back at it, you can see that he was definitely grateful for what we had done for him. He knew that we weren’t there to hurt him, we were definitely there to help him.


It definitely feels good to know that people appreciate what you do, and I mean even though it was caught on camera, even if it wasn’t, I would have done it still, it’s an experience that I had with one of my buddies that I’ll never be able to forget.


(DV) I’m just grateful for the opportunity to get that close to a massive creature like that.


(AH) and be able to tell my kids one day that I put my hands on a live elk, not many people can say that.

(EMG) What a great story. Thank you both for taking the time to share this experience with us.