Last year I posted about how
I was moving from Alaska to Washington and trying to adapt from caribou to mule deer to fill the freezer. I want to thank again everybody who gave me advice going into that hunt. I didn't fill the tag or see any legal bucks last year, but started getting a feel for mule deer country and behavior.
This year, having a bit more free time and running
really low on caribou in the freezer, I hunted really hard for muleys for the first 7 days of the season. I was willing to take the first meat buck that came along, because it would be my first mule deer. I pulled the plug without filling my tag when it seemed I had run out of promising new well-researched ideas to try, and my wife needed help with some things back home. I want to write out what I think I learned from the hunt, both so I can look back over it next year and so I can see if I'm drawing lessons that match what more experienced muley hunters have learned.
I had researched two main areas to hunt before the season, both public land, one in an open sagebrush shrub-steppe unit and one in burned forests in a northeastern WA unit known for good bucks. I had limited time to drive the day before opening day, so I hit the sage (much shorter drive) first. This was a fairly large WDFW wildlife area, and I had just enough time to backpack in a couple miles and tent camp near an overlook of some habitat that looked pretty good on Google Earth.
I was pretty encouraged during the walk in, because it seemed like I could hardly crest a single ridge without bumping does. On the one hand I'd rather not scare a bunch of deer the night before the season, but there was no way to move around without walking by feeding does. I saw something like 25 deer just heading in to camp, including a small sublegal buck.
I reached camp about 1/2 hour before dark and spent just a bit of time looking around from my overlook, during which I saw the back end of a large black bear disappear into a thick stand of brush about 400 yards below me. With a bear tag in my pocket I was tempted to head down there, but the route would have been a lot longer than the distance, and I doubt I would have found it in that thicket before dark. I just pitched camp instead.
Opening morning I was looking over this great view:
Does were everywhere, but they were especially thick on that small hillside behind the valley right in front of me. All the little dark spots on there are bitterbrush, and it became clear quickly that the deer were keying on that more than most things. By 9am on opening day I had seen something like 30 deer, but no bucks. I went back to the tent to warm up out of the brisk wind and glass in a different direction for a little while.
I was picking out does here and there with my spotting scope, when I heard a snort and looked up to my right. There were 7 mule deer standing about 60 yards away staring at me. One was a buck with a bigger frame than a typical yearling, but only 2 main points per side. Looking closer with binoculars, though, I could see a third point, just a little spur near the top on one side. I just couldn't make it out to be an inch. I even switched to the spotting scope, with the deer's head and rack taking up pretty much the full view. That third point was somewhere between 3/4" and 1 1/4". It was standing broadside at 60 yards daring me to shoot, but I just couldn't be sure that third point was legal length. Eventually the group stopped trying to figure out what I was and bounded away:
I went back to glassing near my original position, though a bit farther around my hillside. I got pretty much in position and found that now a group of three guys had shown up and were glassing above and behind me. I don't think they ever saw me. I set up out of their view and watched the same draw as before. One buck with a better-than-yearling frame appeared trotting over that bitterbrush hill, panting, maybe scared by hunters on the other side. I watched it wander around below me for twenty minutes or so, getting some very clear views that made it only a big 2x2. Soon after that, a yearling forkhorn showed up feeding in the bitterbrush. Then I spotted three small bucks feeding and napping about 700 yards away on the next little rise beyond the bitterbrush hill. I watched them for fifteen minutes before getting just the right view in the sunlight to see that one was a small but clearly legal 3x2.
Those 700 straight-line yards were more like 2/3 mile for me since I don't have wings or rappelling skills, with brush to navigate and does to avoid pushing into the bucks and spooking them. It took over an hour for me to get another peek at where those bucks had been:
Although they were pretty relaxed when I last saw them, they were gone now. I had no idea where they'd gone, but they were last seen in one of the few corners of the landscape where I hadn't yet seen other hunters wandering around, so I committed the afternoon to still-hunting every little patch of bitterbrush or other cover in the immediate area, hoping to find where they bedded.
They never turned up. There were only does, and a couple unidentified deer bumped in heavy cover. In the evening I branched out beyond that area to hunt some other gulches thick with bitterbrush, turning up more does and nothing else. I saw something like 80 deer on opening day.
The morning repeated the first, minus all the sublegal bucks. Does galore. Pumpkins in the distance in every direction. I heard a deer get shot not far away, and I was told of another being shot nearby on the previous day. I started to seriously question whether any legal bucks were still around. Hunters had been up and down every good piece of nearby public land already, and I'd looked over a big chunk of it myself. It wouldn't take more than an hour for any deer to slip away onto private land at night. How many legal bucks were left on this public piece? I don't know. But I was a bit enthusiastic for my plan B, the northeast WA unit, so I packed up during the heat of the afternoon and headed out. I bumped a couple sublegal bucks bedded in a patch of tall grass, the only bucks of the day.
Back at the car, I had a nice conversation with the owner of the adjacent private land. Some guys with permission had killed bucks on his land this weekend, too. He told me about the kinds of habitat where he finds bucks, and it sounds like I was looking in the right sort of places but the luck didn't go my way.
Monday morning after the opener I was three hours away from my first spot, a thousand feet above the car near a mountaintop in northeast WA overlooking small meadows like this one:
However, what looked like a fairly open ridgeline with views to distant burned hillsides ended up being a lot thicker than I had anticipated. Most places on the ridgetop looked something like this:
There were only a handful of places with any kind of overlook to glass, and those weren't great:
In the places I had expected the best glassing, where the burn had pretty heavily killed the trees, there were still so many branches it was extremely difficult to see through them to the ground. I found one group of does in this stuff, which felt like a victory in itself:
I had also hoped there might be a concentration of food in the more heavily burned areas, but there really wasn't. The whole area was lightly burned. The food was totally spread out, and I could see no good reason for a deer to leave the dense cover and come out in the open. Given how hot it was, there was hardly any reason for the deer to move around at all.
With hot, clear weather giving the deer no motive to move during the day, the forest being so dry and quiet became a huge problem for me. There was little to no wind, and few deciduous leaves to rustle when a light breeze picked up. It was so quiet the light creaking of my boot leather seemed like a siren going off, and unavoidable dry twigs and patches of crinkly fireweed everywhere made me sound like an elephant no matter how slowly I tried to sneak around. I could rarely rarely move without being easily heard by any deer within 100 yards. That's a problem when I could rarely see more than 50 yards:
In one of the only spots that allowed some quiet, I snuck over this ridgetop and found a group of three does and a spike buck that were concerned about me but not terrified. I saw no big bucks.
The only solution to that puzzle seems to be to know where some bucks live and sit still and wait for their rare, short-distance movements... or get lucky when one is pushed by another hunter. After camping up near the mountaintop one night and glassing unsuccessfully for bucks in the morning, I ran into a local who'd had success opening day by sitting still over a likely spot and having bucks come to him. He was out scouting for next season already. I think that's what it takes to be consistently successful in such a thick place... lots of time year-round with boots on the ground finding concentrations of sign. I wish I lived close enough to do that, not a 7-hour drive away. As an outsider, without weather or luck on my side, it seemed like I was wasting my time in the area, at least as far as harvesting a deer goes. The views were worth the time and climb:
My original plans C, D, and E were all in the same general northeastern WA area as Plan B, and I figured I'd have the same factors making it near-hopeless to hunt without some boots-on-the-ground knowledge or a lot of dumb luck. So after two days there I headed back to my original sagebrush area, planning to hunt some different parts of the same wildlife area. Much of it was off-limits as far as I was concerned because it was within easy glassing range of the roads and the endless parade of guys driving around in circles in pickup trucks. However, for my first morning back I used OnX to find a little finger of 40 acres public land hidden from the road by an annoying climb and surrounded on the other three sides by private. I sat there at first light and it looked promising:
Unfortunately, there were only does. Again. I could glass a large portion of the public land from near that lookout, so I did that again and found a couple dozen more does. No bucks. I decided to spend the afternoon walking in to the most remote part of the wildlife area and setting up camp for the next morning. The habitat there hadn't looked quite as good on Google Earth as where I'd started opening morning, but at least it would be new ground for me.
A lengthy climb on a hot afternoon had me overlooking this high plateau that might not have seen another hunter yet this season; at least, there were no human tracks at a chokepoint in the climb. I think everyone just walked the paths in the valleys.
I saw fewer does than I expected that evening, only ten or so, and those were hard to find. This side of the area was a lot grassier than where I'd hunted before.
The next morning I was sitting atop one of the highest points for miles, with short walks to commanding views in every direction.
In all that space, with my optics, I saw
not one freaking deer all morning. I couldn't believe it. Not even does.
That had me rethinking everything. I had planned to make a 10+ mile loop through this big part of the wildlife area I hadn't covered opening weekend, but I realized now that these wide open grasslands with small sage and occasional willows and pines weren't holding many deer. It wasn't anywhere near as good as the scrubby bitterbrush-dotted ridges and gullies where I started out. I was now all out of new ideas, at least ideas I'd researched fairly well. The next plan was to go back to exactly where I started the season and hope some bucks had moved in. But it seemed just as likely they'd all been killed or pushed out onto private by that point in the season. Spending cold nights in a tent just to glass land where I'd already seen no decent bucks seemed less than appealing. Without the promise of new sights over the next ridge to keep the hunt fun, I decided to cut my losses, drive home, surprise my wife with a nice dinner, and bank some future outdoor-adventuring credits in the process.
Maybe it was a mistake not to stick around for the latter part of the season there, or maybe there really is no point being on a popular WDFW area later in the season, even after the crowds have mostly left. I'm curious whether those who've done it think I was smart to cut my losses, or whether I left when it might just be getting good.