I’ll be headed there next weekend on the 2nd hunt. Not gonna lie I’m a little worried.
I don’t know the unit at all but I’m in Oregon so I do know about units without many deer!
For sure, there are less deer everywhere than there used to be but this is the new reality for now so if we want to hunt we have to adapt, at least until the deer are extinct ?
I was hunting a while back and we had filled our tags early and we had the time off so we stayed and just camped a few days and did some scouting to know the unit even better for a possible tag in future years. I talked to several guys who swore there were no deer in the unit, it was awful, waste of time, can’t believe there are even tags in the unit, etc. (And and argument could be made that there were too many tags etc.) I was pretty certain we hadn’t killed the last deer in the unit. So we went out several times and (imagine this!) located bucks that were hunkered down, away from the roads. And I’m guessing that most of them probably made it through the season undiscovered.
I watched a pair of guys walk within 800-1000 yards (easy glassing distance) of two nice 4 point bucks that just watched them walk by. Those guys eventually saw a dink forkie and put the stalk on it like it was a B&C trophy, totally unaware of what they hadn’t seen.
So, maybe your area is awful, maybe there are almost no deer or it’s blown out by horses or the weather is wrong, the list could go on. If you give up or look at all the bad, it will be terrible and you’ll probably miss out on what is there or will settle for something far less than what was hunkered down just a little further off the beaten path. And worse still than not getting something, you’ll make yourself miserable.
If you want killing, go for the high fence outfits. If you want hunting, give it your all and make the best of whatever happens and you’ll have a good time!
