We put together a group hunt for white-tail and mule deer bucks and had a good response and a few more had circumstances come up which forced them to back out of the hunt.  It's understandable with most people interested having to drive over 6 hours to get to the Area.  We hunted the southwest part which allows all terrain vehicles.  Our plan was to take my Kawasaki Mule down river to the area where no motorized vehicles were allowed and hike in back where most others would not be hunting.  The plan worked well as most hunters were in the all terrain vehicle area.

The first night I arrived solo and after spending the last few minutes of day light scouting out where we were going the next day, I started cooking up some chili waiting for the crew that was meeting me there.  It was a great campground with not many others around and plenty of places to setup camp.  The crew (Blake, Brian, and Loren) pulled in around 8pm pulling a 32 foot camper which definitely proved to be more comfortable than the tent I had packed.  We attacked the chili pot and turned in knowing the next day was going to be a long one.

The First Morning Hunt
We woke up a little past day light knowing that we had no idea where we were going to hunt so we spent some time scouting.  It was some seriously rough country down along the Canadian River bottoms.  After going up and down many rough hills and canyons, we finally found out that going straight down the river bed was the best way to get to where we wanted to hunt.  This was the roughest terrain I had taken the Mule on since I got it at uvcountry.com and I was seriously impressed with its abilities and doing what it did loaded with 4 adults and gear.

We were almost to our planned hunting area when Blake spotted a decent 6 point whitetail in the river bottom crossing where we had just driven.  Brian had not shot a deer before so Blake told him to get out, load up, and take his best shot.  It was a quick shot with extreme excitement on top of that so it resulted in a miss.  I was pretty happy just seeing a buck that early in the hunt and figured it had to be somewhat in rut to be unwary enough to cross right where we just drove.  At least we still had the whole hunt in front of us.

The First Afternoon Hunt
We decided to spend the whole day out hunting and not head back to camp so we split up and started scouting around looking for good traveled trails and rubs.  There was a huge bottom land area that I ended up stalking the whole afternoon.  I found some great rubs and really good evidence of deer bedding up in a few places.  The tough part was finding a good place to setup.  Most of that part of the country is either totally flat fields or extremely rough canyons.  This area was the fields.  It would have been great to have a tree stand around a few cottonwoods I found.

After a couple hours I just had to stop and take a lunch break and what a lunch it was...

I found a great trail to setup on and built a little ground blind.  The wind was quite severe bringing on wind chills in the 20s(at least that's what it felt like).  Dark came quick and I had not seen anything moving at all.  I had spent the last hour on a ridge overlooking the river.  Everyone else only saw a couple does, but where there are does there are bucks!

I also had thoughts going through my mind this whole time because of the public hunting and orange suits all over the place.  There were quite a few hunters out there and you just had to respect the space around each one and find your own place.  My biggest hope was that everyone else would just respect the space I was hunting and find their own.  You can see here about how it was in most places we hunted.  The scary ones are the ones close to you that you don't see.

Can you find Waldo in Orange in one of the next 5 photos?

...and we also had a fair share of "off road groups" who had nothing better to do than drive their rigs straight down the river during the first weekend of deer season.  I'm sorry but that's flat out disrespectful - bunch of jerks!  (ok take a deep breath Allen)

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