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Several folks have mentioned that there hasn't been much in the way of trip reports on this forum of late, soooo... though I'd share my mule deer hunt this last fall.


I scouted this area prior to the season and hunted it early in the season. Found a healthy population of deer with plenty of smaller bucks, but wasn't finding mature bucks. With the numbers of deer and the ruggedness (and remoteness) of the area, I knew there were older bucks I just had to find them.

I packed up enough food four days and headed in early Sunday morning. Pack was about as light as I could manage with food/water and full sized tripod/spotter- right at 35 lbs.

I hiked in the dark for two hours to get to glassing spot at shooting light. Pretty quickly I found a herd of elk, if there was a legal bull in the bunch it would have changed my priorities, but cows/calves and spikes is all I could see.






My plan was to hike a long, high ridge until it's terminus near a Forest Service trail. I was able to glass a good deal of the lower portion and didn't see any deer. I had to drop over a 1000' of hard earned climbing to get to the end of the ridge, but the real work was just about to begin. It was a steep bear getting up. Well so much for my glassing the lower portion. I had only been climbing a 1/4 mile and bumped a two does and a young buck .





I climbed to a saddle and was able to glass the small elk herd better, still no legal bull in the bunch.





I saw a few more does/fawns/smaller bucks below me as I continued to climb. I got into some pretty crappy rocky sections, some of them covered with grass that made footing tricky and wasn't doing much for my stealth either.





I caught a glimpse of movement above me and saw a doe moving slowly and then a bigger bodied deer behind. The bigger deer finally revealed himself- a nice buck. Safety off. I decided to pass on the buck. They eventually got wind of me and dropped over the ridge into an abyss of blowdown and new generation fir. Well that ended that. Of course now I started to doubt my choice of not shooting. A pretty nice buck and a lot closer to the trailhead than where I was headed.

I continued up the ridge soaking in the views as I went.






There was a meadow I saw on the map that I had seen from a distance and had wanted to check out. Nice looking with a really good spring right below it. But late afternoon and no activity.





The spring had a lot of use and you can see where deer were slip-sliding in the ice



I started angling off of the ridge to meet up with a FS trail. I bumped several deer on the way down including several smaller bucks.

From the traiI was heading for a named spring on the map, I hadn't been to the actual spring, but by it and there was a couple of good glassing spots for evening and thought I would camp near the spring and maybe just hunt out of this camp. I found the spring, it was almost a quarter mile further off the trail than the map showed but was there.

I set up my shelter and unloaded a bunch of gear and then headed off for one of the glassing spots.



[img]https://imgur.com/XNVf41c.jpg[/img]

Saw a few more elk off in the distance (no legal bull), but no deer moving. I headed back to the spring in my headlamp eager for supper. I covered a little over 10 miles and over 5000' of gain over some pretty rough country.

I was in for my first surprise that evening. The spring I casually glanced at was actually frozen solid to the bottom. 45 minutes off breaking ice netted me some wet mud. I had a liter and a half of water left, so had to scrimp with it to make a supper and breakfast. The good news was the next spring (which I knew had water) was only 2.5 miles away and I could camp there tomorrow.

My second surprise came shortly after I went to bed. I woke up with my hip touching the floor of my shelter- my air mattress had gone flat. I thought maybe I just had mucked up the closing of the valve. Blew it up firm and back to sleep. 45 minutes later I woke to a flat mattress again. This was not overly good for getting a good night sleep. I put my closed cell foam sitpad underneath my hips and extended the time between waking to close to an hour

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