Hi all,
I moved to Washington this year for a job, after ten years living in Alaska hunting caribou and occasionally dall sheep (never got one), bear, and blacktails. I grew up stand- and still-hunting whitetails in the midwest, but I've never hunted mule deer, and I'm hoping to get my first muley this year. I won't have time in September to do the high buck hunt, so I've got to try during the general rifle season in October. I'm hoping to hunt fairly open country with enough relief for glassing and spot & stalk, whether that's rolling sagebrush hills or mountain meadows, just because I love the scenery and that's the style of hunting I've enjoyed for caribou.
Just for fun before I start asking questions, here are some pics from my my last few hunts.
2015, caribou, Brooks Range:
2016, caribou, Alaska Range:
2016, sheep, Alaska Range, "unsuccessful" if you can use that word for one of the coolest experience of my life because I didn't shoot a sheep:
Believe it or not Alaska can get pretty crowded for OTC tags in non-flyout areas, so I'm used to trying to avoid the crowds by backpacking into the mountains for several days, solo or with one partner. Generally getting more than a mile from the nearest road or trail put me in pretty good solitude, but I'm not sure how to replicate that down here in WA. It seems like in most of north-central Washington, getting a mile from one road or trail puts you within a mile of another. And the few places where that's not the case are easy enough for everyone else to find on a map, too, so I don't know if they'd be worth the trouble or I'd just run into a bunch of other people trying to get away from people. So, is it even possible to avoid pumpkin patches on public land during the general modern rifle season? Anyone have tips for that besides the obvious, climbing high and walking far? For example, do areas of public land that aren't so well-advertised (like BLM and some DNR land) get less pressure than the national forests everyone can find on a map?
I've also been reading a lot about mule deer movements and behavior, but that has raised as many questions as it answered:
Strategy -- A lot of what I've read about muley hunting involves glassing them, watching until they bed down, then making a stalk. Are there places to do that kind of hunting during modern rifle, or is it limited to watching them bed down the night before the season and shooting them at daybreak, followed by several days of chaos as hunters push nervous animals around? Does any kind of patterning become pointless after day 1?
Migration timing -- I've read that the mule deer bucks generally spend the summers in the high country (on open ground to protect their velvet), then move down to the flats to feed on sagebrush and bitterbrush in the winter. Where exactly does the modern rifle season fall relative to the timing of this migration in north-central Washington? Should I not waste my time hunting down around 1,000-3,000 ft elevation unless weather has kicked the bucks out of the high country? Or are there plenty of resident bucks in the right lowland places year-round, just not as many as in winter when the high bucks join them? Similarly, should I not waste time hunting up high if it's already snowed enough to push the deer down? How much of a storm does it take to get them moving, and how long do they take to start arriving in the lowlands?
Numbers this year -- I've read some discouraging things about how many deer people are seeing in Okanogan County this year. But I've also noticed that every year, every unit, every state, somebody's saying it's the worst they've ever seen it, not like the good old days, and the wolves and cougars and bears and velociraptors already ate every furry critter in a 50 mile radius. So how bad is it, really? Is it just worse than usual, or is it so bad I really should be looking at a different part of the state? Are numbers similarly down in Chelan, Douglas, and Grant?
Hunting around burns -- I've read conflicting things, with some sources talking about great hunting following a burn because of all the food it provides (for how many years after the burn?) and others saying too many burns have really cut down numbers. Can anyone elaborate on what to look for with regard to burns nearby, what makes a good one and a bad one? Is it best to look for an area with a good mix of burned and unburned? Is it that burns in the pine forests produce good summer forage, while burns in sage brush country just kill winter forage that takes a long time to grow back?
Online tools/tips -- The best I've found are OnX maps of public lands (seem to include everything I've found on various agency websites), WDFW harvest stats (I was enough of a nerd to make my own maps from these but they have good ones on their site), this website, plus good articles/videos on online scouting on Google Earth (an
article for mule deer, and a Randy Newberg
video for elk that seems applicable). Anyone know any other really helpful places to learn, or books that are especially applicable to WA mule deer hunting?
Lastly, locations -- I know better than to ask anyone for their secret spots, but I'd like to float a few general areas I've been looking at on Google Earth and see if anyone can offer any advice about them, even if it's just to explain why a spot's not worth the trouble (no deer, wrong time of year for the area, overrun with hunters, etc). All I know about these spots is that they're decent-sized chunks of public land in units with some modern rifle mule deer harvest. Given that I know nothing about their deer populations and I'm just taking a stab in the dark, I hope that naming them here won't send any pressure their way. In no particular order, I'm wondering about:
- Chopaka Mountain
- Highlands on either side of the Similkameen River west of Oroville
- High country off Grade Creek Road
- Sinlahekin Wildlife Area, Carter Mountain unit
- Sagebrush hills east of Palisades
- Private lands listed by WDFW as hunt-by-written-permission around Baird Springs Rd
Thanks in advance for any help.