LAST EDITED ON Jul-22-08 AT 03:26PM (MST)[p]A light dusting of snow normally won't move the deer to the lower areas. It takes enough to make getting at their food a problem.
About 20 years ago, a buddy and I had late eastside permits. We drove up two days before the season in bluebird fall weather. Thus, I decided to camp high and actually not too far from where the most recent fire was. So we set up came, including a 12'X 12' tent with an 8'X 12' tarp as a dining fly hung off the front.
The next day we did some scouting, mostly in the big woods and found lots and lots of fresh sign. That night, about 1 a.m., I heard a crash and felt this enormous weight on my chest. About 6" of very wet snow had broken the aluminum center bar of the tent, and the whole thing collapsed on top of us. We literally had to crawl our way to the door to get out.
Anyway, it was still snowing and as soon as I saw the amount of snow, I told my hunting partner we were going to be in the wrong place come morning. We threw everything into the back of my truck and headed down to the low country, via the main highway to the Houserock Road.
We then took the Eastside game trail road to the tops of the lowest set of ridges, where we parked and waited for sunrise. Two hours later, we had both tagged 4 x 4 bucks and headed home to Phx where I spent the next day drying out all the camping gear.
I also killed my biggest Kaibab buck (see below) under similar circumtances in the late 1960s. The only difference was we had set up camp down low on the Eastside GT to start because there already was a good amount of snow on top. -TONY
This is a scan of old photo of our camp.
As you can see, there even was snow down low that year. My grandfather (in the background to the left), who was in his 70s then, killed the smaller buck in the Jeep. -TONY