Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Wall tent hunting camp

I’m not going to be doing my Adirondack wall tent deer hunting trip this year, at least not like I have done the past couple years. I have joined a hunting club, actually 2 adjoining clubs, in the Cranberry Lake region of the Adirondacks. The motivating reasons are this area has been logged and the forest managed over its history resulting in higher deer numbers than I am accustomed to in the “forever wild” region in the high peaks. The other reason for the change is the opportunity to build our own camp on timber company land. The camp didn’t materialize this year, but that’s where the wall tent comes in.
I would like to set up camp for the duration of hunting season, early October- late November. My biggest concern is a bear trashing the tent. There are more bears in this region that I encountered in the high peaks, and a canvas tent saturated with cooking smells left unattended could be asking for trouble. Any suggestions on what to do to keep bears away? I’m thinking about trying a solar powered electric fence around the perimeter. Maybe cayenne pepper sprinkled around?

I’m not a bear expert, but small ears usually indicate a big bear. This photo was taken 1/4 mile from my camp site.

There is also a very healthy moose population in the region. 40 years ago moose were non existent in the Adirondacks, now they are nearly commonplace.

Set up an electric fence to run off a solar charger/deep cycle battery. May not be foolproof, but for the price/effort I can't imagine it wouldn't be good peace of mind. Some polytape, step in posts, and a go at it.

Moth balls and sulfur spread around the tents perimeter? Supposedly works for rattlesnakes.

The guy who puts bee hives on our property, every year, uses portable solar powered electric fences.

I finished setting up camp last week but still haven’t spent the night there. Talking with others in the area, even though there’s bears in the area, they tend to shy away from camps. So I’m taking my chances, no moth balls or electric fences. I am keeping everything clean, and not leaving any food there.
It’s been warm the past few days with a cold front coming In Saturday. I’m heading up Saturday afternoon until Monday evening. Veterans Day week I’ll be there for the whole week. I’m getting a few buck pics, and there’s lots of scrapes. It’s looking promising. Some areas have more moose sign than deer. That’s amazing considering 30 years ago moose were basically non existent in the Adirondacks.

Great pictures! Good luck with the hunt!

The guys with a camp 1/2 mile down the road from me have trail cam pics of several different bucks also, including two slammers, one long tined 10, and a draft horse sized one with it looks like palmated antlers. Also pics of two different bull moose. Actually, one of the bulls wrestled with the cable gate on their access road, the bull won.

Allways enjoy your posts Miguel keep them coming.mb

Me too. I can’t wait to see how it pans out for you. I spent Monday and Tuesday in the Moose River Plains area. Kicked 3 deer, saw 1 tail for 9.5 miles of walking. Pretty sparse down there, but all they have to eat is moss, ferns and mushrooms. Some logging would be so beneficial for all wildlife up there but good old NYS will never allow it.

Electric fence is cheap insurance.

I too greatly enjoy your Upstate my posts!

Miguel,

I too really enjoy your posts! I spent many a year (I was stationed at Ft. Drum for 10 years) hunting the Tug Hill / High-market areas and you are doing exactly what I wanted to do while I was there and never did. Enjoy your hunt and keep the posts coming!

The OP says he's not interested in an electric fence but this is for anyone who is interested.
I use a portable electric fence for my pack llamas when I camp near the truck. The fence is too heavy and bulky to pack in.

I just grabbed some photos from the web. You can find anything here at a local farm store except possibly the charger or energizer. The 1st time you set this up, it'll take a while. Once you get it right, it'll be much faster next time. Here's a good article put out by the state of Montana on bear fences. They're a lot more elaborate than most guys need but it'll give you some ideas. BEAR FENCES

I set up a 50x50 fence. It takes me about 30 min to set the whole thing up. I use 3 wires for the llamas. For bears, I'd suggest 4 or 5. You can buy bear fence kits but they're mostly for backpacking and are barely big enough to go around a pup tent. This one is MUCH larger.
Plastic step-in posts are pretty cheap, like $5 to $6 each for 4'ers. For a 50x50, I use 9 posts. 1 for each corner and 1 intermediate on each side, plus 1 more for a gate. I guy out the corners with ropes and 2 stakes. The intermediates don't need guy ropes. I suggest wire tape at least 1" wide to be very visible. With these posts, just clip the tape into the hooks.
With the llamas, all 3 wires are hot as their feet will give a good ground. A bear's feet are wide and less likely to make a good ground. I suggest 5 wires for a bear fence - 3 hot and 3 ground. Make the top, center, and bottom hot and the other 2 grounds to increase the chances of the bear hitting both a hot and a ground at the same time. If the ground is damp, all hots will work as the bear will be grounded.
You'll need a good ground for the charger. If the ground is damp, any steel or copper rod pounded a foot or more in the ground will work. Here, it's usually quite dry that time of year. I use 2 rods hooked together with heavy wire. I dig a shallow hole about 6" deep and a foot across for each rod about 2' apart. I drive 1 rod in each hole then fill them with water to soak up the ground. Adding more water after it soaks in will make a better ground.

I use this battery charger from Kencove, called a Strip Grazer. it uses either 8 D-cells (total of 12V) or it can be hooked to any 12v battery. A charger uses almost no power unless an animal hits it. 8 D cells will last a month. Using a larger 12v battery will last for many months as long as the battery will hold a charge on it's own. A solar charger isn't needed for just a fall hunting camp. STRIP GRAZER This one will put out about 1/3 joule. Bigger ones will put out a lot more juice which would be better for bears. You want to get their full attention.
Some guys smear peanut button the on the hot wires to lure the bear into licking it. Once he's been shocked a couple times, he usually won't try again. There are exceptions.

Camp is lookin' deer ready, Miguel.

Hope you score on one of those bruiser Adirondack bucks.

I made it to camp Saturday early afternoon. It was quite warm, and sunny, but a cold front was coming in that night. I wanted to get a ladder stand set up along a good travel corridor that has an abundance of scrapes. Im not much of a stand hunter when woods hunting, but the abundance of sign and the close proximity to camp made it look somewhat appealing.

I covered a lot of country over the weekend, all of this land is new to me and it takes a while to get your bearings. Most of the club property has been heavily logged in the past, lots of berry briers, Beech slash, and dense spruce thickets. Lots different from the mature hardwoods of the high peaks I am accustomed to hunting. The middle picture shows a dead tree in the center of the shot. This is the largest tree I have ever seen in the Adirondacks. Where the top is broken off, has to be 100 feet in the air at least, and 4’ in diameter. I’ll have to check out the base of it the next time I’m by there.

I was told about a fighter jet that had crashed back in the 50’s and to keep an eye out for the wreck. I found it on rainy Sunday morning. Apparently there were mechanical problems and the pilot ejected, dying from injuries. The plane crashed into the top of this little mountain. Really an eerie sight. The first thing I thought, all of those stupid movies where most of the passengers survive a plane crash with minor injuries are such fiction! That was thick aluminum that was cut and twisted like paper.

Got the camp looking good, it’s so much easier than going into the back country. But I’m over 3 miles from the nearest paved road, and I have never seen anyone drive past. About a quarter mile down the road the beavers have flooded the road out, so essentially I’m at the end of a dead end road.

Getting some good pics of some nice bucks and bear but mostly nocturnal. Now that the full moon is done and the weather is cooler, the rut will pick up steam and anytime of day will be good in the woods.
I’m going back this Saturday-Sunday, then Veterans Day week. That week my oldest friend will be coming up to hunt. We haven’t hunted the Adirondacks together since before he went in the Navy back in 1987!

Nice posts

I don’t want to hijack the best way to make coffee thread from the Hunters Campfire, but a percolator on a wood stove is tough to beat. Add more grounds every day, brand doesn’t matter, boil until the coffee is strong enough to float a mule shoe, drink piping hot.

Great thread.

Thanks for sharing.

Always enjoy seeing how folks hunt in different parts of the country.

A lot different than the plantation pine I hunt here in MS.

Following along - can't wait to hear this hunt unfolds.

Good luck to ya.

I'm putting you on ignore.

Alright, you're back off ignore.

Best of luck with your new camp.It has been a long time since i hunted up there,there was an old guy my friend knew that had a gunshop by where we hunted,Pumpkin Mt. Gunshop,but this was 1984 or so.

I remember that place and the old guy. Cool little gun shop, and he was quite the gunsmith. I bought a Ruger 77 RS carbine in .358 from him.

Looks great Bill. Those dam porkies will chew on pretty much everything. I think I'd worry more about them than the bears!

Miguel-

Please keep the updates coming--I am jealous of you!

Ditto your doing it with class..mb

Cool thread!

Great looking camp Miguel! I’m across Champlain & heading for Maine with this weeks snow to do some tracking. I’ll be wishing my camp was as nice!

Good luck this season!

I was only able to get to camp for Saturday afternoon and Sunday this week. Everyone who isn’t a small business owner thinks you can make your own schedule, couldn’t be further from the truth. But you do what’s needed to keep the business rolling. Either way come Friday, I’m off for a week and I’ll deal with the fallout.
I’m still trying to get a feel for the property, and without OnX and a compass, it would be impossible. The property consists of two distinct types of terrain, ridges and small mountains that are covered primarily with young hardwoods, primarily beech, and thickets of berry briers. All of this has been logged quite heavily in the past, and the scars are still fresh.
Then there’s the creek bottoms. Jungle like spruce thickets that are nearly impossible to walk through. Every once in a while you’ll hit a peat bog that is a blast navigating. Basically bedding and feeding areas. Bed and security in the thickets, feed in the hardwoods. As the rut progresses more time in the hardwoods chasing does. The big woods is always a guessing game, deer movement changes daily. In my wandering this weekend I found as much moose sign as I did deer. This really blows my mind, as moose were non existent here 40 years ago.

I found this signpost rub and placed a stand nearby. There’s a great trail leading out of the spruces into the open hardwood here. I have never been much of a stand hunter in the woods, but it is worth a try, especially when the sign looks so good.
I tried rattling and grunting this weekend to no avail, but I’ll keep at it. I have a feeling it will pay off.

When I had a place in the Southern Tier, the bucks started chasing 11/6-11/12, like clockwork. I bowhunted the swamps and tried to be in my stand as much as possible at that time. Paid off, too.
Did you add a bear tag? Best $50 I ever spent.
A little bit farther west these days (~2K miles), but we still enjoyed a tent camp this year, complete with percolator on the wood stove. Good luck to you.

These cellular trail cams are great, but they can make it almost unbearable not being in the woods. One of the other club members supposedly has mountain lion pics. There have been scores of sightings over the past 20 years, but NYS DEC refuses to acknowledge their existence. If they don’t exist, I guess it can’t be much of a crime to shoot one.

Wow, that's real deer hunting!

Oh heck yea. Very cool

It’s torture having to work this week. Come Friday I’m headed to camp for at least 7 days. This pic was taken last night at a scrape I found a few weeks ago that I freshen up every time I go by. I think this is the 5th different buck I have visiting.

I remember Pumpkin Mt.. Was in there a lot in the 80's. Can't remember the Smiths name, Nice Guy. Talked with him quite a bit. He had a Win 9422 mag. on the rack. Wished I had bought it.

The weather has been all over the map this week. Hope you’re having (or had) some luck. Seeing and hearing deer just no results yet. They are much more active since Wednesday here (near sevey’s corner)

miguel.great pics,may i ask what part of adirondacks you are hunting,also the moose living there now is a shock to me.when i was a youngster back in 1966 my dad bought a summer home on schroon lake.spent many weekends and all summers there for years.most beautiful and favorite place to be for me for many years.dad sold to a good friend in 84 as he bought oceanfront property and built a home in north carolina.have not been back but plan on it in 2024.remember us going to the dumps on weekend nights to watch and feed the bears.was truly gods country,it was difficult to explain to people the air smelled so pure and fresh you could almost taste it.

The week in the woods was incredible and went by way too fast. The first two days in I had an old friend staying with me. The last time we hunted together was a 1987 camping trip around Wanakena NY Adirondacks. He joined the Navy soon after, and hadn’t hunted since. We had a great time in camp, although it was challenging hunting with him. He really wasn’t into taking it too seriously, but once I figured that out, we had a blast.
Once he headed home to Virginia I started hunting hard. The weather was great for the week, but very little snow. Twice we had about 1/2”, and then it was gone. Forget about tracking. I wanted to try something different this year, and I used the grunt call much more aggressively and often than ever before. I also gave rattling a try. I had rattled in the past, but never had much luck with it. Skane had reached out and offered some tips and encouragement to give it a honest attempt. I have to thank him again, it is definitely a worthwhile weapon in your deer hunting arsenal.

Lots of moose sign all over the property, but I didn’t see one. They are definitely here though!

I changed the scope on my 7600 .30-06 carbine this year. I had been using a Leupold 1.5-5 Vari-XIII since I bought it in 2019 and had no complaints, and it always worked perfectly. But if you spend enough time reading about Leupold hate on online forums, you start to question the reliability. So, I thought I should try a new scope. I settled on a Trijicon Accu-Point 1-4x24 with the German #4 with green dot. Optically it is a better scope than the Leupold, and the reticle is BOLD, and very quick on target, especially with the illuminated center dot. The problem is it is considerably heavier than the Leupold and really affects the balance and pointability. Overall, I’m not really too happy with the new set up, and didn’t carry the 7600 as much as I usually do. I’ll probably be doing something different with this rifle for next year, I may even go back to the Leupold.
The other rifle I hunted the woods with a lot this year is my Remington Model 7 FS in 7mm-08. It wears a Leupold VX-r 2-7x33. Fully loaded it weighs 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and points like a dream. With 140 grain Nosler Ballistic Tips it is extremely accurate and deadly. These FS model 7’s were the deal of the century. Those Brown stocks are perfection.

I bought a Rem seven FS in 7-08 this fall and am using it this season. I really like it. It needs a deep cleaning since it was well used by a previous owner and it will get that over the winter. But it shoots great and points nice with the 18-1/2” barrel.

We get quite a few moose pictures on my families property but have yet to see a moose rub. Those pictures are great.

Good stuff, Miguel. I have taken 3 deer hunting trips to the ADKs. I am starting to put plans together for next November. On my 1st trip I hunted from a tent/base camp. The next two were bivvy hunts. I hunted the east side in a wilderness area and saw very few deer but did blow a chance at a buck on my third trip. I am itching to go again but want to go later in the season than in the past in hopes of possible tracking snow. I have a wall tent but I am not sure if I am going to go that route or bivy again. I might also try an area that is not wilderness in hopes of higher deer numbers from logging.

Let us know if you got one. I am enjoying your pics.

The weather cooled down some and we got a little snow, but barely enough to try and track. The ground still wasn’t frozen and anywhere the sun could hit the snow melted quick. Although tracking was difficult, the snow kick started deer movement and rutting activity.

As I said earlier, I was grunting and calling much more w aggressively this year than I had ever before. Twice that week, both times early morning, I had smaller bucks, a 4 point crotch, and a small basket rack respond to grunting. Both times I was still hunting the edges of spruce thickets and they charged out into the open hardwoods to find the intruder. I hadn’t had anything respond to the rattling yet, but I kept at it.
My last full day to hunt, I gave rattling a thorough try. I had been concentrating on the spruce thickets, but around noon I tried a swampy area, willows and cedars, and a steep rock ledge forms a funnel. I rattled a long sequence, maybe 2 minutes, paused five minutes, then another two minutes sequence, making all of the noise I could. Then I settled in for at least an hour wait. I couldn’t see my downwind side as well as I would have liked, it was too thick, but I had great visibility on all other sides. About five minutes after I quit rattling I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A really nice buck was about 30 yards away from me, directly downwind. Just as I saw him, he smelled me. I already had the crosshairs on him, but there was heavy brush between us. He took two steps to backtrack and I had a clear shot.

What’s left of a .284 140 Grain Nosler Ballistic Tip, found just under the hide on the opposite shoulder.

Congrats on the buck! Nice shooting!

The little Model 7FS came through again! He didn’t run 20 yards and was done. I was surprised at the size of the body, especially the neck and shoulders. I guessed him at over 200, but once he made it to a scale he went 193lbs, not bad for the Adirondacks! Nice heavy 8 point rack that he abused fighting and knocked a point off, so officially a 7 point.
The nicest thing about hunting on private land as opposed to the Forest Preserve, now instead of starting to drag I went and retrieved my Honda Rancher at camp and made short work of getting him hung on the meat pole.

I owe a huge thanks to Skane. He gave me some great pointers on rattling, and the confidence to give it a good attempt. The funny thing is, he really emphasized how important it is to keep watch downwind of your rattling location, and that’s exactly how it played out.

Way to go, brother! Thanks for taking us along. Beautiful buck.

Congrads on great buck! Enjoy your thread every year!

Miguel, great story and pics. As has been mentioned, real deer hunting.

Bob

Great buck, nice story.
Thanks for sharing it with us!

Congratulations "M", on a great hunt !!

Yes, Scott is a font of deer hunting knowledge & a really good guy !

Dude!!!

Awesome and congrats. You stuck it out and earned a great northwoods buck. The only way it would be cooler is if you popped it with that 7600.

Great buck Bill. I'm glad it panned out for you on the new club!

Congrats. That buck has a dome on him. Pretty darn good first year on your lease.

Way to go, Miguel, congrats!

Nice job !
Great thread !

Good going there. Amazed though one would do online stuff in season. Once I get to camp, communications are non existent.

Everyone has their way of doing things. No need to be amazed.
In Central Oregon I don't have Internet where I camp, so there's that.

Thanks for the ride[again] and congrats!

Packing up camp was bittersweet, but i brought my Brittany Gus along for the ride and we were able to hunt partridge for a couple hours. When I was deer hunting I was constantly flushing them, but they were hiding from Gus. He didn’t care, he loves being afield, birds or not.
I’m contemplating building a camp here next year, but more likely I’ll use the wall tent again. My wife is warming up to the idea of moving out of New York, and instead of putting more roots down, it may be smarter to start cutting ties. Either way, I’m sure I’ll be hunting in the big woods again next year.

Fantastic Miguel ! Even though I have hunted the adks before and am only a few hours south, don’t get there much anymore. Maybe someday. Thank you for sharing .,

Well alright! Happy to hear you found success! Congrats!

Great job,and a great post ! All that hard work paid off !
I won t be able to hunt this year,i was in a cast all summer/fall and have just started walking around agin,so i've really enjoyed this alot,thank you !
For those of you that remember the PUMPKIN MT. GUNSHOP,
My friend was a steamfiiter and had worked up there somewhere in the late 1970's ,a power plant mabey ? That is where he met the owner,he was a pipefitter and a machinist too,and did gunsmithing on the side.He called him GRAMPS,I have his card somewhere ,and a receipt for an 1894 Marlin in 38/40 i bought from him,it had a special order 28" barrel,even back then i knew it was rare,too bad it was stolen years later.I ll have to look for them.
When he retired he opened the gun shop.It was a log cabin. Since my friend knew him well and knew i was into guns,i was shown his private gun collection,finest i ve ever seen ,before or since.I was a drooling 18 year old kid,i was just floored.My friend did tell me he passed away a while ago,i always wondered what happened to all those old guns.The Shutzen /Walnut hill rifles were the ones that stand out to me,i had never seen or heard of them before,he took the time to tell a young kid all about them ,even let me hold one,i was surprised at how heavy it was. He was a good old guy.

Congrats!!Nice buck

A neighbor used to ply the woods post season to gather all the abandoned firewood. His stack amounted to acres as opposed to cords.

Great buck!!! Congratulations.

Congratulations on a really nice buck and you have an awesome hunting camp.

Well done. Never fails that I see grouse more often when big game hunting, than when I have the dog and scattergun. Keep up the good work and excellent posts!

Sounds like good deer cover. I rarely flush grouse when I hunt in the ADKs. Most of the cover is too mature where I go for good grouse numbers.