Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics What happened to Leupold?

Oh I'm not giving the Adirondacks a hard time...

I am actually not real surprised:

With an elevation of 5,344 feet above sea level, Mount Marcy is the highest peak in the Adirondacks.

Humphreys Peak is the highest natural point in the U.S. state of Arizona,[5] with an elevation of 12,633 feet

Guadalupe Peak, also known as Signal Peak, is the highest natural point in Texas, with an elevation of 8,751. There are actually 11 peaks over 8000ft in eleveation in TX.

I live at 6388 feet. I didn't realize the Andriodaks didn't even break 6000.

The thing that makes hunting tough in the wilderness areas of NY isn't the height of the mountains. It's that they are covered in mature forest and deer are very scarce.

I worked at a camp in Minerva NY during the summers as a pioneering counselor in my college years. I’ve climbed Mt Marcy a half a dozen times, it is pretty country but it doesn’t have [bleep] on the western US!

How high above sea level the valleys/foot of the mountains are makes a difference too. I've been all over the West. I said before the Adirondacks and Catskills are not the rockies.

Fixed it.

We have a bunch of tough places as well, though the elevation numbers may not be impressive. A common feature in some places is the mine "break", hidden cave-ins that can land you in places where you'll never be seen again.

I never said you didn't. I was just making an observation and wasn't making any notion as to how hard the hunting is, or is not there.

Mom's place is at about 3300 feet, with a 9350 foot peak less than 3 miles away. I guess that I always took it for granted as to how easy of access I had when younger to mountains and wilderness, for those who enjoy that kind of thing.

As I pointed out earlier, there are large parts of the West that are not only steeper and higher (even just comparing valley bottoms with peaks) than the Catskills and Adirondacks, but large portions can be pretty empty of game-especially at higher elevations, where there's less feed and longer winters. So it sometimes takes a while to actually find game (or even sign) when hunting in higher-elevation wilderness, which usually requires a lot of hiking--or horseback riding. This is because a lot of western big game (especially elk) is far more willing to move a LONG way to avoid hunters. Have hunted days before finding fresh sign, let alone the animals sought, in the higher country.

But there are also large parts of Montana that are thick timber, mostly (if not entirely) populated by whitetails rather than mule deer. They're not usually abundant, partly because of winters that drop about as much snow as falls in the Adirondacks, and partly because there simply isn't much feed in thick, conifer timber.

Yes, deer (and other big game) are not abundant in the Catskills or Adirondacks. But have hunted both some, and cannot remember not seeing reasonably fresh sign of various kinds of big game, especially deer, within a day or two. Yeah, they may be hard to hunt, but in my experience whitetails (especially mature bucks) are hard to hunt ANYWHERE on public land. They're not different deer just because they live on different sides of the Mississippi River.

The WMA I hunt close to home is in two sections of about a square mile each, surrounded by private wooded areas, farms, and farmettes easily reached by simply wading the Shenandoah, walking across a county road, or just travelling through the woods a bit. Doesn't take Bambi and Co. long to figure out where the nasty men with guns are. Tough sledding during the rifle season, which is why I invested in a crossbow last year. Not very high or steep for the most part, but lots of cover is best traversed on hands and knees, and even the open areas are pretty thick with brush, briars, and head-high weeds. BH's leverguns would be ideal here, but I still prefer light bolt actions; just a personal quirk, one of many.

Have hunted West-by-God for deer (and varmints) and have experienced exactly that. But it ain't that different from certain parts of Montana--including the nearby public-land WMA riverbottom.

Well, except for the occasional moose. But have run across fresh moose tracks in the Adirondacks....

I remember you writing about that, sitting under a tree with one of BH's .35 Marlins IIRC.

Yup, you gotta go pretty deep into the woods here to find any moose, or pdogs either.

I've read about "your" WMA in the RLN. Having a good place to hunt close to home is great, even if you can't air out any of your rifles there. I also avoid weekends on mine. Rifles are legal almost everywhere here except for a couple of special ML areas, and the four counties where only vertical bows are legal. Those counties give up some boomers.

My biggest (nothing special really) buck was taken in Raleigh County on the "mountain" behind my ex-wife's childhood home, still-hunting with my son, and using a Higgins M50 with irons. Tough shot through a bunch of saplings at about 75 yards. Not likely
I could pull that one off now!

Figured it would be a long way to any moose in your country--but have seen the WV prickly pear!

Never seen mountains that are covered in mature forest, with scarce deer populations..... these Smokey Mtns. are rough!

Those Adirondacks are rugged azz mountains.......

I do like their chairs though...

Mature forest is very poor deer habitat. The unbroken canopy prevents sunlight from reaching the ground and chokes out growth on the forest floor producing very little food for wildlife. Combine that with long, hard winters in the Adirondacks and you have very few deer per square mile of habitat.. It is considered some of the toughest deer hunting in the entire US because of the low density and the vastness of the forest.

According to who? Can't be that hard given the fact that you claim to have killed over 200 of them there.

I have not claimed to have killed over 200 deer in the Adirindacks. That would be impossible to do legally in two lifetimes. There are no doe tags available in the Adirondacks due to low deer numbers. I have hunted all across NYS, from the Catskills to the Adirondacks to the farmlands of central NY and the finger lakes region. It's the farmlands that have high deer numbers and doe tags available year after year. I have friends and relatives who own property in those areas and have gone there to fill multiple doe tags nearly every year. The Adirondacks are considered some of the toughest deer hunting in the country by pretty much everybody who knows anything about deer hunting in the continental US, which you and several of your dunce buddies here obviously do not.

First it was "the big country, as badass as anything out West", then it was terribly low deer densities. What are the densities there anyway?

Thick forest and low deer numbers? sound like where I live...... are the grizzly's bad also?