Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Back from the deer hunt

So, our draws left us lacking a little but a few weeks ago my wife managed to snag an interesting muzzleloader buck tag off the reissue list. However, we had never hunted the unit and we wouldn’t have time to scout it. So, much as I hate to do this, we decided to pack in blind.
We picked a spot that looked very huntable in a wilderness area basically on the drive out. To us, it looked like good deer country with the combination of rocky cliffs and scattered trees, timber pockets and shrubby vegetation. However, it wasn’t particularly high country, with the trail starting at 9200 feet. We had debated going into real high alpine stuff, but with the weather forecast, we figured it could turn to snow and that would make for a rough pack trip as the goats would need more food and the deer could get pushed down into the timber.
It was a gamble.

I had to work the first couple of days of the season, so we’d be going in on day 4 of a 9 day season with only 4 days to hunt.

We arrived in the unit at dawn and Katie passed up a dinkathon buck standing in the river watching us drive by. She said she wouldn’t shoot a little one until at least a couple days in, but a part of both of us might have been relieved to just get it done with right then and there as we felt as unprepared as we ever have.

We got to the trailhead mid morning, loaded the goats with packs that we spent the previous day messing with and set off to find a camp before the weather got us. I gambled a bit by not packing a large amount of water but I wanted to keep things light to be able to get in quickly before any weather hit. Thor had about 30 pounds total, but the others were closer to 20-25 pounds each. I had basically just a 2L water bladder and some field dressing gear and first aid stuff. My wife had a similarly light load plus the rifle and possibles bag.

With this being a muzzleloader hunt, we at least needed somewhere to leave a rifle out of the rain. The trail was pretty easy going and I slimmed the fattest boys down a little bit throughout the year by putting them on a diet. They all did well with minimal huffing and puffing and very little drama, as they are pretty experienced at this point in year 4.

We got to where I wanted to camp near the junction of two trails so as to best position ourselves to not end up in a dry creek. Remember, we hadn’t scouted this, and I’ve camped places that should have had water but didn’t before. (See my mountain goat hunt from 2019 with these boys). It was a bit under 10,000 feet. The area rises to some serious elevation, but I had hoped there would at least be some resident deer around.


Just as we got the tarps up and tent up, it began to rain. The goats, being the natural a-holes they are, really didn’t want to share a tarp shelter with the lower ranked boys so we also threw their coats on. Figured the orange coats are a good idea anyway, though we didn’t see anyone around.







TBC….