Uttaxi1
Active Member
- Messages
- 622
I was fortunate enough draw a general Utah deer tag this last year. It's tough for me to get out as many of you know I a full time big game taxidermist. I had a line on a piece of private to hunt so that's the route I was going to go. Well, that all changed when we found out my Dad drew a rocky mountain sheep tag. (check out post Dad's Rocky). With his hunt overlapping the general deer I without hesitation turned in my tag. I knew I couldn't swing missing that much time out of the shop. It was a couple weeks later I was having a conversation with a long time client about the falls upcoming hunts and was offered a chance at a CWMU voucher. I asked what the dates were and they said I could hunt in November. That was huge admin was hoping we could get Dad taken care of I could get caught up on the intake from the deer season. I started hunting the 1st of November and was excited as it was all new country to me. I was lucky enough have my brother and one of the operators of the CWMU along for some help. There were a few other state draw hunters as well as several of their out of state guided hunters. They had a great plan of attack and all of their guides spread out to everyone plenty of area to themselves. The draw state hunters were allowed to go wherever they felt like they had the best chance. Day 1 was very windy and most of the deer were held up in the thick stuff out of the wind. We still were able to glass up several bucks as a bunch of does. We seen alot of elk as well. Day 2 we had a major weather change as the wind from the previous day blew in a good snow storm. It started snowing just before first light and dropped 12-16" of snow that day. Even with out limited visibility we were still able to locate a bunch of bucks. Still nothing of the age class I had in mind. Alot of 3.5.yr old type deer. With only a few bucks acting rutty. I have never been a score guy but really love big mature bucks. Nothing we had seen after 2 days and 60 bucks even had my trigger finger even tingle. We kept checking the weather forecast and it was looking like Day 3 was going to be perfect. Day 3 found us hitting many of the same areas as Day 2 but we were seeing good numbers of deer everywhere we looked. I had a feeling we would find something today. Especially after 2 days of bad weather that had kept alot of deer hiding. We had glassed up about 40 different bucks before 10 am, but still nothing nof that I was confident that was older. It was about 1030 when we started glassing a little saddle between 2 canyons. There was several bucks still on their feet feeding. We kept glassing that area and after about 5 minutes a buck stepped out from some scrub oak trailing a doe. This one definitely caught my attention. His body was the first five away he was one that I needed to look at further. He was at least double the size of the doe if not bigger. He had 4 good forks and nice eye guards. I looked at him for several minutes and then left to find another deer. We got to out next glassing spot and then I realized I probably had made a mistake. We went back and started looking for him again. We couldn't find him for about 15 minutes. He must have just been in a little a little cut we couldn't see. He then showed himself again and I decided that after seeing over 100 bucks this was definitely a mature deer and probably should get ready for a shot. I asked my brother for a range and he said 305. I dialed 3.5 moa and sent one on the way. It was a good hit and he didn't move. It was a beautiful day and a great week of making memories in the Great outdoors.
