Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Montana Youth Hunt 2023 - Backpacking Trip

Day 3 - Meat Run

There are a lot of great ways to start day 3 of a hunt. Having a nagging feeling that you should get your meat off the mountain is not one of them. We repeated our hunt in reverse from last night and found the same group of does and the solitary 2-point but never found the pair and never turned up another.





We had a team meeting and they voted for a meat run to our house to put the deer in our cooler. With the meat down at lower elevation it was a pretty simple packout although the mules were tired when we got to the trailhead




Their only request was we stop somewhere along the way for gas station pizza. There are no such gas stations between the trailhead and our house so they settled for calling in an order to Mom’s kitchen for a frozen pizza.

Travis would be coming to camp in the evening or the next day so Addie decided to stay home and leave her camping stuff for Travis. She had worked her tail off, shot straight, brought a lot of fun to the camp and even packed part of her deer home. If pride is a sin I may go to hell for how I feel about that little 10 year old.

Trevin and I made it back to the trailhead and were resting in camp within an hour and a half…about 30 minutes before we needed to get serious for the evening hunt.

Thinking we might have an uphill shot we played with the bog to get the right height. It didn’t take long before we saw a deer butt and got to practice our tripod deployment strategy.



There is an African PH somewhere smiling knowing that Americans are working on their techniques. I like the system but not quite ready to trade my Kennetrek’s and long johns for Courtney’s and khaki shorts.

It was just a small two point we had already glassed up a couple times. He was still safe and we pressed on to where we had bumped the heavy 3-point yesterday. Rather than approach from the road we went high, hoping to get above him and see him before he saw us. It worked…well except for the seeing him first part. He got up from his regen/deadfall bedding area and stotted off without so much as a look back.

We ran to a saddle I thought he might cross and waited a while but no luck.

We still-hunted back to camp and again found two small bucks that could have been taken easily from the sticks but Trev held fire.



Too bad, they could have been rolled to within 100 yards of camp

Travis couldn’t make it in so it was Trevin, some dehydrated meals, a little pre-downloaded Meateater on Netflix and dreams of big dear and brow-tined bulls as the general season opens tomorrow!