EP 68: Q&A Mule Deer Tips and Tactics with Jason Carter and Adam Bronson

and sometimes it's opening day of the rifle hunt we haven't seen the deer for two weeks and we killed them they start rutting they're moving migrating things like that you're covering the numbers you can't just sit there and hunt a deer passively anything to do with western big game welcome to the epic outdoors podcast powered by under armor hey everybody jason carter and adam bronson here with another podcast coming at you from epic outdoors um i don't know what number we're on 60 or 70 probably probably closer to 70 but anyway uh just pumping them out here we do have uh another one here for you today as far as our question and answer we're going to kind of wrap this up for this one um got a lot of good questions i guess chris just informed us he's kind of grouped them up and so we're going to do a lot on mule deer questions today so we've got

kind of an interesting podcast uh you know we'll just uh kind of do it spontaneous it's not like we've studied for this stuff we're just going to read them some of these first time i've ever seen them so anyway it'll be interesting but whatever comes to mind is what you're going to get um before we get started uh i want to thank underarm for sponsoring these podcasts they do a lot for us here at epic and got a lot of good stuff coming at you here this year for 2018 usually comes out this summer we've been checking out some of the new models the 2018 models and everything looks good so far of course we got to test it in the field and get aggressive with it but uh we expect good things so anyway thanks to underarmor for all they've done for us thanks to a lot of our other uh sponsors as well they sponsor us here in the magazine and do a lot of other things for us and we'll kind of throw

some of those ads in here with these podcasts so anyway just want a little shout out to everybody that works with this as well as you guys out there listening uh we hear a lot from you and we love it we appreciate it and thanks for listening and a lot of your comments uh on the side on what direct message or whatever you call it pms dms whatever so uh anyway this is a question and answer podcast but before we get diving into that we do want to remind everybody of course the colorado deadline came and went you know it was april 3rd uh the new mexico draw results we expect to be out pretty soon so uh won't be too long on that and then uh nevada's obviously due uh april 16th and so make sure you get your applications in for nevada there are quite a few changes in there it's kind of tough to navigate around their system a little bit until you get used to it once you get

used to it it's pretty awesome uh you can go in there and change your choices many times you want doesn't cost you anything uh just some cool things about it but uh two they do have a new 365 day hunting license that does not mean it's a two for one where you can use one hunting license fee and apply for two years it is one hunting license per bonus point year per year so every year you're going to have to buy that to get your points and so make sure you do that even if it's valid during the application period next year don't think that you're going to get a point you do that you're going to be sitting out and not gaining a point for a year so anyway you'll want to you want to do that and uh get everything in of course the drawing odds are tough but you get your applications in everywhere you can and there's a lot of opportunities over there so anyway i guess

we'll get started adam we don't want to read that read off the first question all right this is from jason and he asked he says huge fan of the show when i'm in the office here at phone scope i cost constantly listening to your stuff i've listened to the randy olmer podcast at least 50 times 50 yeah that's a lot i wonder if he's working you think chestnut's getting good work i don't know hopefully he's not turning himself in by writing this question into us but anyway says keep up the good work but he says i've had i have hundreds of questions but i think the biggest one would be what do you think the best scouting tactic is for here in the west when it comes to mule deer glassing trail cams what is it for you guys thanks for everything so take it away well i think like and i'm sure you'd agree adam but it just totally depends on where you're at

whether you're high country low country mid country and the season dates um if you're hunting in august and september that's going to totally be different than maybe like the second third four seasons in colorado when you're talking latter part of october like such as even idaho they start rutting they're moving migrating and things like that you're covering the numbers so i don't know what do you think adam should we break it down like yeah say it's august september archery august yeah start that way so anyway yeah so it's gonna vary i guess uh you know as far as august i'll take august here august september you know these early season bucks um you've heard it a hundred times from both of us here scouting and patterns kill deer uh patterns kill deer and so if you're gonna if you have time to pattern a buck um definitely you're gonna be uh you know you're gonna you're

gonna hunt all summer and you want to hunt those earlier seasons if you have time to you know scout all summer you don't want to be hunting the rut on that same unit you're scouting you're gonna want to hunt early when you when you scout units you hunt early if you don't scout units you want to hunt later and maybe get lucky and rely on the rut so archers and muzzleloader hunters you guys generally speaking now there's some late hunts in nevada and other places um you know even new mexico january 1st to the 15th cool hunts like that that are awesome but generally speaking those archery for mule deer archery muzzleloader hunts seem to be early and when they're early uh you scout you scout for them here in utah we've got a lot of early seasons and whatnot nevada especially they start august 10th with the archery hunters which is awesome and of course you see on social media all

the first bucks that hit the pages on your flip phone are generally archery bucks in nevada so um so anyway scout early when you go early you're obviously uh you know that you're going to be glassing a lot glassing is it is huge it's paramount as well as trail cameras if you're in kind of an area where you can lock i mean trail cameras are popular i guess in any elevation and depending if you can bait or not using salt or water or whatever you're doing um trail cameras are are quite popular and and we use them too we use them heavy we love them but we glass heavy too and so glassing and trail cameras early season for sure yeah and i think definitely the unit will dictate that as well some units that are thicker don't have a lot of burns or things like that if they're early season you're going to have to probably work cameras a little bit more to help give you an inventory of

what's there and then a certain buck or two shows up and then you're then it prompts you to start glassing all right he's here somewhere i gotta lay eyes on him i gotta find out where is he going to bed what's his feeding locations things like that i mean there's other places like i don't know like a henry mountains we run cameras down there more or less to try to gain pictures of bucks that we know are in a general area to help supplement you know what they're looking like or whatnot but it's a glassing unit i mean it is we've every deer we've ever killed there we've glassed up and found that way and so trail cameras is not not the you not the type of unit that we that we find deer for the first time on a camera wow we got to go back and find that deer in real life so to speak so the units will dictate that and definitely some of these more arid states like nevada or arizona

the strip and different places like that where water is a lot more scarce your your ability to trail camera bucks is going to go up and get a higher inventory books that way if you're hunting mountain units trail camera water is not going to be you're not going to get the the biggest segment of the bucks hitting water because there's too much water there's streams there's you know little seeps and stuff everywhere you'll get them and you can help supplement it that way but you're probably gonna have to glass them up to find out what's there yeah i think too to add on to what you're saying it's is um let's say adam these guys draw a tag they're not sure about it they don't know a lot about it i think the biggest key is to find out like let's say you had a rifle tag on the poncegont versus a rifle tag on the henrys you can hunt scouted bucks on the henrys with a rifle you are conversely

poncegont they're gonna move and so you're not gonna scout as much you might learn the road system but they're on the walk heavy yeah you'll be scouting an area that has very few deer on the poncegont in august and september just learning road network learning places glassing points maybe we're gonna want to camp you know talking to people where deer are gonna be moving into versus finding one deer to hunt there's a few exceptions of that and year by year you can occasionally find a deer on the northern end the summer range or something like that that stays put it happens there's parts of the unit where the deer don't move maybe they're dependent on some of the fields and things like that they live there year-round but for the most part yeah you got to learn something about the dynamics of your unit and and the season that you actually have a tag in and that will kind of dictate

how much scouting you put into it how much glassing you do early on versus hey run trail cameras um trail cameras are you know definitely in most every state the archery in a lot of cases muzzleloader happens first so they're probably more more important that way uh by the rifle hunt patterns can change so i think too is like we we of course colorado's on the brain glad that it's over everybody should be in and applied for that and uh quite a rush on that one but it is one of those states that every mule deer hunter thinks about but there are units like unit two they're not going to migrate a ton like like the plains in colorado you're not going to versus like let's say the core portion of the mountainous country on the west slope you know you've got a lot of migration that happens in those and so

you know if you're gonna if you're planning on you know drawing a 35 tag or a 18 tag or any of these i mean we could throw out about any unit you know you're not gonna if you're gonna draw those later season rifle hunts you're not gonna pre-scout those but unit two like for example unit two um i don't know why that's on my brain today but anyway you know you're not gonna you could pre-scout that a little bit but uh the rut does change things things walk around move around a little bit you know we have seen things like nevada down in 27 you know bucks will walk maybe five miles or so but they're not walking 50 they don't have a heavy migration you might even get a little influx from the northern units on the late on that november rifle rifle hunt but it's not a bad idea to throw out some cameras early season wouldn't totally hurt so i guess what the long and short of it is adam what

do you think like you gotta figure out what unit you're hunting then you gotta figure out your vegetation and and then you gotta figure out what your laws are as far as running salt or water or whatever and now we're running up against trail camera laws a couple different states nevada and arizona proposals on the table so it could change before between now and hunting season might change so i mean we've always classed and we've always relied upon that there's a few places i know jason especially you in nevada trail cameras can can be key early on there's other places like that we hunt idaho um obviously colorado places like that that we don't live we go and we we we rely totally on glassing we don't even run cameras drive sometimes it's as hard as you can drive cover as many deer as you can that's right cover the numbers and so all right well hopefully that kind of helps a little

bit a little bit of everything you got to be prepared to do everything we'll even sit in tree stands if we absolutely have to so anyway i think it's just a matter of of uh figuring out you know is it long range glass and short range glass are you going to use the btxs that kent's have it's kent optics or what you're going to do so um anyway i guess speaking of btxs i know they've been kind of hard to find they've they've been out of stock um our buddies there at kent's optics are good dudes and uh they they have some of the best prices of anywhere we've seen so they're up in northern utah up in tree mountain um you can give oh dave harrow a call it's numbers 435-257-7014 he says if you tell him jason and adam sent you he'll make you a deal so anyway let's move on to the next question sounds good once you locate a buck you want to kill could you explain your process

not deer you catch on trail camera but deer you spot in the field and the steps you try you take to try to get him tagged uh bow hunting in particular obviously with the rifle the process is short and exponentially i know you have to find him first that's obviously the first step give me steps two through maybe 500 and uh how you go about scouting uh where you start and once you find him how do you follow him etc thank you brady i don't know um jump into that one well i guess we'll just kind of talk about bow hunting because that's kind of where he where he went because it is differently with the rifle but you know i know both of us are pretty patient when it comes to hunting deer with the bow and what i mean by that is we don't just bull rush and take the bull by the horns and think we're gonna just

intercept him on a ridge as he's feeding more times than not i mean i would say 95 out of 100 most of the time i i wait for them to bed um now there's a few instances when a certain deer especially if you've been watching him throughout the summer and you see him on a ridge and you're like i know if i see him there he's gonna go over this way you might try to beat him to that location have him feed in front of you before he goes to bed especially if he's going to real thick thick stuff i know you've run into that jason with you and some of your clients and friends in nevada if you know the direction he's going and it's a sea of cedar trees and you know as soon as he's going to walk in there you're done for the day because you're probably not going to watch him hit the ground you you hunt differently that way you want to beat him to the tree line intercepting that way but

for me um it it's usually watching bed in a spot you know if it's a unit's conducive to that you watch him bed and then it's even wait because oftentimes in the morning your wind is still pretty calm and it's usually not blowing the same way it's going to blow at 10 to noon and then sometimes it even gets stronger from noon to four in the afternoon when the when the when it heats up and you got a real steady wind that's probably the best time but you know obviously for a lot of different reasons it's hard to sit and wait for perfect um sometimes you get thunderstorms that come up and ruin it deer gets up and moves because you were too patient and that happens but um usually i guess for me i usually wait for the deer to bed and i know that it's kind of permanent bed a lot of times deer will bed and they'll they'll be in that first bed for less than an hour sometimes they're just

kind of went down because the sun hit them and boom but they'll usually bed again maybe once or twice before they're down for the day so maybe you take it from there and add to that or what you think yeah and i think you're i think you're exactly right i think the biggest thing a lot of times um when they bed you know where they're at yeah so when you keep a buddy or somebody watching them yeah they're watching them and and keeping you posted on that but you when you bed you know where they're at and they're stationary the downside is is they're just chilling i mean they're really keen keenly aware of their surroundings and so sometimes i know we found that you know you'll bed them once and then and that's just kind of an initial bed and usually within 30 minutes they might get up and re-bed but

once they kind of get into that second or third bed you know you can bet they're down for a couple hours two three hours yeah yeah and so if you can get in there and get close and the biggest thing and i think uh we talked about this with uh randy omer on our podcast and of course we could all learn a ton from him he stalked and killed as many or more than anybody i know so anyway sometimes depending if you get that strong wind and you get it in your favor and you can get close and and you feel like that wind's not going to change maybe you got a storm system coming or whatever you can stay there if it's in your in your in your favor you can be close for a long period of time and when he stands up at one or two in the afternoon or whatever uh to switch sides or or adjust because of the shade or whatnot then you kill him that's your chance now randy at times you

know he doesn't like to be in close for hours on end because you run you do run a chance of that wind switching within a three four hour period and him getting your wind and so every situation is different i think that's what you alluded to is whether it's a burn trees tree line rocks you know big boulders you can hide behind whatever there's a lot of different variables and so we've we both had our bows and hands running dead sprints before oh trying to be and it's not pretty you know and you're running you're huffing puffing because you know the deer is at six eight hundred yards away and you're doing a big circle loop to get on the tree line or and you know that is your own your best chance for the day because if he goes the ways he's going you're done until that night when he maybe feeds back out yeah so 100 right there was one buck we had forks there in nevada and chris was with me

chris we don't give him a mic so he can't really rebuttal anything we say but anyway um chris was with me to video it and he we knew he didn't go to water we knew what with the trail cameras he had not been to water he liked to water every day and a half two days max and so we knew he was thirsty and he got up one day you know later in the afternoon and was walking direct to water but he was in thick trees and we couldn't keep track of him like nobody could keep track of him and so we just kind of got in front of him where we figured we were between him and the water in thick trees and he freaking walked by us and that's when we killed him sometimes you just get lucky man you can't you don't know why yeah you go with your gut a lot of times but that goes with you know watching the deer enough it goes

back to the scouting and things like that like i said there's been times i've i've done things more aggressively because i saw i'm like oh my gosh i can't believe he's there and i need to i need to try to kill him because that's a vulnerable spot you know and if you're hunting i think it's it's a different too if you know if you're hunting high up in the mountains and things like that you have a lot different weather sometimes you have you know a lot of these hunts take place in late august 30 september and where we hunt in southern utah and in nevada you have thundershower monsoons and that that's a big dynamic that can change from daylight you could have no clouds and by noon two o'clock there's wind blowing everywhere whipping and you're just it can wreak havoc but in general terms if you

don't have one of those systems kicking up you'll you usually by late morning midday you'll get a stiff south breeze that's our predominant wind in our part of the world and so you can count on that so if it's swirling and doing the wrong things early on don't run that risk you know be patient um you know we've we both hunted we had an archery deer tag together on when was that 2002 in in nevada 2012 2012 sorry i knew there was a two in there somewhere um not that long ago but yeah we we each hunted like 14 i think 14 days you hunted 18 days we both went down swinging on that hunt we swung terrible hunt in the world but but we hunted patiently we hunted a couple of deer the whole hunt and we we blew them yeah we bounced them a couple of times and we'd see them every two to three days we'd see the bucks and it were long days in between when you didn't glass them up in

the morning and you had nothing on it was a long hot miserable sitting in the trailer at 105 with the ac on hoping your generator didn't die but um so it's a little bit different if you're in a situation where you're hunting general season and there's people everywhere i mean you may have to have a different approach to hunting the deer because yeah you can't just sit there and hunt a deer passively in a situation um when you've got people buzzing around everywhere things like that so your situation is going to dictate you know how rapidly you go through steps two to five hundred and there might not be five hundred there might be three steps remember that one time when that az buck we call him he's i don't know why but he was bedded on that big old rock ridge that that hogs back and and i think you went down and got right above it like it could have been over right yeah there wasn't

really a lot to that there was stalking and peek over the edge and killing right before he got in position he picked his head up and walked out just not even just across the moon open didn't know we were there he was just like i'm moving and it was hot and we're like you know why'd you do that 20 minutes later he'd have been dead probably yes and uh there was just thing after thing on that hunt just different things and so i guess the long and short of this and like you said we do get monsoons and remember your deer hunt on the henry's and it freaking pounded us with rain and then all and you're still sitting there and he's he went down to the thick trees then because he was getting drenched and like we were and we were huddled under whatever we could find and yeah and it pretty much wiped the slate clean and that you know i just kind of hung out the rest of the afternoon until

maybe we got a glimpse of him that evening and luckily he fed back out and we were in came back and basically walked to you kind of thing well you had to walk a little bit but it was just you just never know but i think the biggest thing is i think the little things just one thing and we got some other questions here but but the one thing i think the little things kill deer little things kill big deer and that's like making sure you know you don't clink your freaking rangefinder on your bow or your or your you slap your um release on your string or arrows or whatever there's just lots of little things your killing process has to be simple you know that has to be refined that stuff is the stuff all you do back at your house you're shooting you're ranging your your you know stocking socks or shoes that you have on for all that we're kind of ignoring that from this that you have to have

all that refined and we're just talking about the making the advance on the deer that's right but your gear and you have to mentally and think one last thing one last thing um never assume that the deer smelled you heard you saw you and bounded away you never assume that every time we're like oh i should have seen him by now pretty soon you get antsy pretty soon you get sloppy you rush it and you blow him out all of a sudden you look you see him and he stands up and you're like oh shiz i thought he was 50 yards to the left instead of the right and he's been here all along if i'd have just been patient how to kill him it's the hardest lesson yeah to hunt mule deer patient because they're so hard to kill and to be patient when you have one that you think's kind of in your grasp with the bow especially because with the rifle you sit down at 500 range him and and you snap a stick and you

assume the whole world heard it and they didn't yeah you just think it seems loud from your three foot perspective because you're three feet from the stick snapping uh just do not take no assume nothing make the stock till the very end and and then if you walk up to his bed and he's freaking gone then he's freaking gone but make sure you you you follow that through to the end don't don't assume anything until you know all right next question adam and jason i know every situation is different but how much will a big deer tolerate how much will a big deer tolerate and if he does move generally how long does it take him to come back p.s i love the blue mountain this is from ken i guess he's talking about the abajo san juan yeah that's i guess where he's talking about that's where i grew up i love it

too can't be blue mountain southwest desert no there's blue mountain probably three of them in every state or five of them in every state but we're assuming he's talking about southern utah so this is one of those things that i think definitely depends on the time of year we've seen early on if you in august a deer will tolerate a lot more bumping um generally you can hunt and that's nice because when you're hunting with a bow usually you don't kill them the first time you try to stalk in on them you usually can get multiple attempts sometimes you go a day or two without seeing him boom then he's back in a little rotation wherever he kind of hung out or maybe he didn't get up as early in the evening and things like that to see him but i i think it depends on the time of year you'll you'll see a deer a lot more and maybe hunting every day some days with a bow um if you have it's just you

and the buck you know i'm not talking you got people with quads everywhere and they're pushing them in the timber who knows good old southern utah yeah and even like you talk about wyoming g when the when the force shows up i mean we all have heard about that that those deer go in the timber and it's a different deal and it usually takes something in that case like a weather event to thin the hunters out or to change the pattern of the deer for them to start sticking the nose out at a different time of the day but but i think the time of year is probably the biggest thing when you start getting in my my experience you start getting into october and you start bumping deer then you might not see him again you might not it just they start becoming and acting different yeah make sure you'd make

that one chance happen yeah i 100 agree with you they'll tolerate more you know brutus we hunted him a couple of years and the first year he tolerated not as much i don't know why ended up killing his buddy luckily the next year i bumped him 10 times and i've told that story before and i had a guy oh from back in the eastern plains of colorado say that you know he made every single stock count its first time clients included and never has had to stock twice and i don't know anybody else that's that's that capable that efficient can you can you handle the i mean there's weather there's all kinds of variables that aren't in your control so and maybe you'd bump a doe and he bumps but she bumps a buck there's just a lot of things that happen so i i haven't had that happen to me and i'm not that good yet but anyway i think overall you do have you know what you do have the velvet you obviously

have more and more opportunities the closer you get to october 1st to the 20th october 5th to the 20th that's the worst time frame in the world to hunt a deer it's tough they're acting they're they're rubbed they're just feeding and bedding they're not thinking of does they're you know they're not out in the daylight a whole lot and yeah you bump them then and sometimes you're talking to deer that you bump them and in certain units they're they're at the brink of when they'd be starting to drift to an area to rut anyway and they're like all right i'm out of here you know i'm gonna start start slowly drifting so it definitely depends on the time of year no no question and if you got an opportunity in october to see a deer and you're on him you better get him killed yeah we've bumped deer there's been a couple of smart deer that bump in the velvet and you you've ruined it but

and and that those are you know specific uh situations but overall overall uh you'd have a little more opportunities earlier season later on later on you're you could be done and uh very very very very frustrating i gotta say um all right next question we've good to move on i really enjoy the podcast my question would be how many times do you hit a spot to try to locate a big buck and once you do locate a big buck how many times will you check on him a week if you don't see him again the second time when do you give up on him i'm talking more in the summer months connelly um we don't ever the number one thing yeah if you know a deer is big i don't ever give up you're no i've gone for weeks and weeks without seeing that deer and and then all of a sudden boom there he is and so for whatever reason especially if you're on public land you there's a lot of other

people out there hikers naturalists you know four-wheelers atv-ers they could blow them the you see them on one weekend go back the next week you don't know what all's happened and transpired there guys just running through horses or people cutting trails on the forest service burning chainsaws it doesn't matter stuff can can interrupt them but if i know a deer's there and this doesn't matter if it's a even like on the henry mountains which a lot of people say oh it's easy a lot of big deer blah blah there's some deer there when they get to october they turn hard to keep track of daily in the summer you almost see them every day um but um you know it's like that's a very open glassable unit but you get it later there's times i've gone two three weeks and i know a deer's there and boom he shows up and sometimes it's opening day of the rifle hunt we hadn't seen the deer for two

weeks and we killed him yes and you don't give up if a deer's big enough to kit that you want him don't give up until you get too late into the year and then if he's gonna drift the winter range or something then yeah that's you gotta pull the plug and he could be lion shiz yeah but you gotta if he's big enough you take that chance and that's the thing that he's not and so i think too one part of this is um you know how many times you hit a spot to try to locate him just to locate one like just to find one and so a lot of that depends on your past history in that particular location if you know if you have a couple of named bucks from years prior one or two years prior then you hit that spot hard you hit it really hard but if it's something where you don't know if there's a particular buck you might only hit it once or twice and it's just luck when you see

them and so you know but you're covering the unit now once you find one a lot of times i don't check on a lot of people tend tend quote tend their bucks i don't tend bucks i don't there's a lot of reasons not to in my opinion the chance to bump him or you draw attention to the area yeah yourself yeah right oh yeah yeah you're gonna need to trade trucks four and five times instead of once you know what i mean to try to keep because you got it's just the way it goes out here so i think overall don't check on you when you check on a buck that's a morning or an evening that you could be finding a bigger buck and so even if he's a 230 buck we're looking for something better or we're looking for buck number two buck number three you know backup bucks and so in the velvet in the summer they are not gonna move unless something crazy comes in a lion moves in a lion a pride of lions whatever

moves in and move them off the water you're screwed okay he's gonna move four or five miles um possibly depends on where the next water is and and and how harassed he really is but overall man don't move on video him enjoy him the next month check on his progress see how big he's he's gotten fine do it a couple of times don't freak out when you don't see him just keep keep freaking pounding the unit go from one end to the other there's a lot of guys that just really get into a rut this is my spot this is where me and my family hunt we hunt this canyon and we don't go anywhere else and if you do that you are limiting buck number one two three and four there's bigger bucks maybe in lots of other parts of the unit but you you you've got narrow tunnel vision well and and i'm always you know you play metal games when you're out scouting because yeah we you know you would like to

try to try to check places off if you have hit that a couple of times i don't think there's a buck there worth checking on this year looking for but then i'm always you know reminded when you go somewhere and boom you found a find a big buck right out of the gate and all right the hunt the hunt progresses and now you're there you know and it's time you know we're not talking about not tending a buck during the middle of the summer but when it comes hunting season yeah you got to try to pattern that deer a little bit and get ready for the hunt that's what i mean yes but all the times we'll go back to the to the unit i'll go back there four or five days in a row and i won't see the buck that i know is there and so then i'm like geez well how many places have i already checked off the list that i

went twice and didn't see a buck and now i've been here the first time i find a buck here and the next five i don't see him um and the sixth time there he is it's you all got to go with your gut and the visibility and the terrain and all that plays into that if you've got a wide open face and all that and there's not as much for a deer to really hide from you yeah you don't need to cover it as much but so that plays into it as well but bottom line if you know a big deer's there and it's in that earlier fall and he's not going to be moving to run anything like that you hunt him don't give up and sometimes adam you'll have a client that'll be like antsy and so you'll be he'll force you to go hunt buck number two or three and then you come back to buck number one and boom you find him yeah that's right it's happened like that and then we're grateful same adam kearney let's just throw

him under the bus for a minute all right so that guy same thing he he uh we were hunting bucks and a lot of times we were looking at one high 90s bucks and he's like dude let's go hunt this one oh man fine so we go hunt that buck gratefully and i don't know maybe i just didn't even take the lens caps off my freaking binos but gratefully we didn't see him and then it turns out he kills a net book non-typical by the end of the hunt you know you couldn't have scripted it better but at the same time he was getting antsy we all get antsy i get antsy at times adam you get antsy i mean it's normal to want to get that process on the road and kill something yeah and if you have a if you have a friend or something like that and you know a buck's there a family member you know try to try to split up because yeah putting all your eggs in one basket

when that basket seems to disappear it is hard to keep doing it is but um and there are situations where yeah you find a buck in july and he gets killed by a lion before bow hunt and but those are going to be rare you just if don't don't chalk it up to that until you find him dead that's right all right all right um next one if you draw a premier mule deer rut tag in your home state is it worth scouting as much as you can locating different hit list bucks till your hunt starts question mark or is it better to just save your fuel and wing it and try to locate as many does as you can while that while on your hunt since the bucks are always on the move checking dose this is from quincy um yeah this would probably have a lot to do well this is our home state he's asking so i mean but we don't hunt our home state in utah with a rifle we never can draw we don't we don't have any i don't

know a dolores triangle rifle deer is like it my little ponts here and there a little bit on the ponds but light muzzles on the general but yep but for the most part no we don't scout we any scouting would we would be simply to learn the unit and a lot of cyber scouting you call it that with studying your maps talking to people have been there before biologists learning where deer are going to be showing up to versus going to try to find a deer to kill yeah you know i think too one thing uh i knew i was going to draw my max points in arizona and so the year before um i went to the kyobam and looked around on 12 way west and i think you know on the late season i went opening day i watched people kill 200 inch bucks and glassed them uh and visited with them and you know it was just it was awesome and so a lot of these states you can tell when you're going to get drawn utah you you know give

half the tags to people at the most points or colorado it's a preference point system or whatever and so if you can do that go look at that unit during the season and if you like it what you see it'll reinforce yeah i want to come do this is good or and you may have a bad weather year and it might make you more apprehensive to do it so you can't judge it all on that one three or four day snapshot that you're going there to experience but but that's the best probably option during the rut and then the second half of the question yeah you're generally if it's a true rut hunt you're better off to just cover country and cover does that's that's my opinion cover does like we did on my 12b hunt yep we went out knew where the does were and we each split up us three split up and and the 270 inch or walks by you that's right and we had no idea he was there it was just we were

hunting the does yep that's how you do it now individual bucks you see a deer you know or know of a deer have heard of a deer rutting in a certain area one one winter or you see him personally um show up on you know let's take some of these late muzzle loaders in utah on the general general units buck that's going to die this year there's a couple of bucks like that that we see the first 10 days of november and that's only 10 days or so after the general's over they're vulnerable if you have ideal weather or similar weather they're gonna probably get killed they move to the same areas and rut and i don't want to say the exact same there are bucks at straight line when they're looking to clean up the last few does or something they straight we call it straight line and they're on cocaine they don't know where they're going they're just looking for

a girlfriend so you know same kind of thing what we've got but we do see uh here locally we do know specific bucks and everybody's waiting for them to show up to rut to show up to on the winter range and if you hunt the season like these late muzzle seasons here in utah they're vulnerable during that time and you would hunt a named buck you would hunt a specific buck if you draw a random tag in another state let's take idaho and adam and i both hunted late season idaho it is not something we would even think to pre-scout you're covering the numbers ruining a truck as fast as you can and and absolutely glassing high numbers of deer yep that's right so anything to add that we've kind of skipped over on that one no i think we pretty well crushed it all right go to the let's see where are we at here let's see question um once a buck reaches his his antler prime how much of his

growth for a particular year is affected by his health coming out of winter versus summer feed conditions i noticed last year a few bucks were a year older but noticeably smaller they had an incredibly tough winter in 2017 the summer feed was an all-time high levels 150 more from hay from some fields from previous record but they were still smaller thanks ty yeah we it everyone tries to figure out this question this is a question that will never be fully answered it's hard to know um what goes on in a buck's life you've got you've got a lot of different factors in as far as antler growth you've got uh age genetics feed conditions obviously and we all talk about um how i mean if we had non-stop rain in april and may our bucks would be off the charts because they had no winter i mean this

year zero winter this winter yeah but it's but it's and so yeah they are healthy and and whatnot and you do have that summer feed carrying into fall if there was rain in the fall and all that and and then uh but the one thing you can't quantify is how old that deer is and what are his true what's his true potential we have bucks and we've talked about this in other podcasts that are 20 30 inches down you've had it on the henry's even and and the henry's is is kind of a higher elevation not this total bottom desert that we're hunting in some places and you notice the difference in that antler growth as an average and then you'll have some bucks last year there's some freaking weird you know desert buck blew up to 250 or 60 inches and in a unit that we wouldn't have expected it and other bucks were down

in size and so a lot of it is you know is he healthy himself did he did he step on a stick wrong is he got some kind of you know infection yeah who knows yeah the antler growth will always be secondary to their body but so if you have an easy mild winter and then you don't have a drought and you have a good spring and summer they're probably going to produce at least normal or above more normal but um tie the example you gave us there have an incredibly tough winter my suspicion is they were so worn down from the winter and they had to just simply get their body back into condition and there was not enough not as much going to their antlers that year despite the summer forage being off the charts that was just a product of probably having such great winter moisture that feed was off the charts but it took

them a time to rebound after they shed their antlers and get back into condition you know their body maintenance comes first and antler development is second and that's why places like places like the arizona strip you never have winter kill i mean i'm not going to say never but show me a winter i mean in recent in our lifetime yeah um it's it's it's moisture and feed driven out there it's drought that's what hurts hurts deer grow and they have genetics the best genetics in the world they're going to have age because they have limited limited entry deer um quotas so if they have the feed and and if they have the water and they're not having to travel too far to water and spend more time hunting water than feed and all that they're going to probably have an average to above average year and when they

don't we see it and there's anomalies there's somewhere years that we talk about it like we thought this year is going to be incredible here and there and it just seems to be all right you know so you can't predict it perfectly but yeah my suspicion is is in that instance your bucks wherever you're talking about there were just so worn down you know maybe it's wyoming maybe it's colorado after every winter some of the states like that are prone to it they're going to take a while to get back on their feet so to speak before they start growing and by then they're they've lost a month or month and a half of prime antler growing time yeah and so and we've also seen where well like 2012 we hate talking about it because it was so bad that we legitimately knew of one deer that was over 200 inches and they killed

him he was 207 um anyway and and what a study it was 230s high 230s the year before and in 2011 and same thing like we killed goofy that bull back in 2003 and he was 434 the year prior was like the worst drought on record it was 2002 unbelievable drought and we have video of him giant fifths and he he was a 440 inch type bull he was probably living on some wet little you know riparian spring or whatever so there are things i guess just saying don't don't just give up if it's a terrible year don't there's something out there in some condition some year of a buck's life and for one reason or another he's awesome what even though the average may be down so why don't you read this one this one kind of sounds like for you i haven't mentioned your name i glanced at it so i haven't even read it uh so after looking for 10 years on the desert for mule deer and only only seeing tracks i managed

to see a herd of deer three of them were bucks that had dropped i know jason hunts the deserts a lot i'm looking for some knowledge i'm nervous uh i will never see them again what are some things i can do to keep tattles on them without pushing them out just kind of new to desert hunting don't want to lose them after so long of searching that's a tough one uh if you see tracks their deer make tracks and so you've got to figure that out um somehow you got to find where they're watering if it's desert there's limited water and there's some cases that there are streams and it's tough to throw camera streams and whatnot but put cameras on there you start to figure out what the what deer there then you can glass and figure out where they're going after they feed and water all night um if you can't trail camera and then you're you're glassing and uh they're making tracks and so

there there's deer there i think you just need to glass your freaking guts out and and generally in the desert especially early season they are not traveling far they're weak they don't like it just like you and i don't like it we can get into a camp trailer we can get into the camp trailer and and kind of get a little breath of fresh air so to speak and enjoy some air conditioning they can't and and they're hot even though they live out there they're not enjoying it either so they don't move a ton so they're there somewhere um you might even uh you know we used to drag cedar trees around water or wherever you're seeing these tracks drag the roads and then track them and once you track one or two of them down even if you bump them it's okay you can bump them they're going to come back remember they're in the velvet but but figure out where they're going track them down

um and and run tracks you know you can figure out how they're coming in and out by you know spreading you know basically clearing the dirt and raking it take a rake i don't care do whatever you got to do to figure out what tracks are old what tracks are new and you got to just keep narrowing it down to figure out what those deer are doing maybe it's only two or three or five deer will make a ton of tracks and so you might have seen what you you were going to see and maybe just happened on them accidentally that particular day and it was an overcast day and they were out in the middle of the day i don't know the whole situation but um they're there somewhere yeah i agree with all that and i guess the one determination and this sometimes is even is an easy determination sometimes it's not um is to try to decide if these deer are resident deer there versus all right or this is this a desert

area that you're at now and you're in march you're talking about or april i don't know some of these bucks have dropped their antlers so or is these on a very far extreme end of a migration and they're gone in another month they're heading back you know you look at a poncegond or something like that and most people know enough about that to know if you're on the very southern air that in arizona and you see all kinds of deer down there you're not going to be looking for a deer down there in august i mean there's a very few of them but if you're in part of the deserts in nevada or arizona parts of the desert there they're probably or utah parts of the core desert parts of utah they're they're living there somewhere and they're maybe nomadic seasonal uses of parts of that desert but if you got an area like that you you need to do just what jason said you need to try to find

them at a different time of year because that time of year when they don't have antlers all right doesn't do you any good but find the waters start within a radius of there find the waters plan on trying to get some kind of a location you know on them in the summer you start seeing one you see one in velvet it changes everything because now they're setting up where they're living in an area that generally that looks like it doesn't have good groceries good feed and all that but it's the desert looks like crap looks like crap but if they're there in the summer it's there because they usually want to be there if they're there in april you know march or april they could have been pushed 40 miles from their home off of you know a mountain unit and they're out there just wandering with a heavy winter light winter whatever deer do weird things all winter long you know in certain places

they can wander like that yeah well and there's a lot of places they may migrate like like you said generally you get 90 percent of them are migrational deer and then you got a 10 percent that are chilling out and will be there in the summer and so anyway you may never see them again that is that is true you depending on where you're at you may never see them again but generally speaking you know you come back you know january through march of that next year you're gonna have deer there they like to they're very habitual so yep exactly so i want to give another shout out to one of our key advertisers epic outdoors that's qu make some awesome awesome gear wide variety of gear very advanced mountain hunting equipment they have everything for base layers outerwear awesome packs sleeping bags tents boots accessories everything like that they all sell direct on their website at qu.com quiu.com

no retail markup great gear we've had it since uh the first versions of it they've come a long way great supporters of us at the epic outdoors for the beginning so check it out awesome all right well we're running in here um last question uh when hunting an area that is only accessible by foot or horse how close is too close to camp where you're planning on hunting i'm sure the wind direction and terrain have something to do with it but do you have a preconceived distance or is it a judgment call depending on the species and time of year we'd love to know your thoughts i it's it's interesting how close people will camp to the game they're hunting and uh uh you know if you're gonna have a nice loud camp every you're gonna have people coming and going driving in and out running a generator uh some guys like drinking beer chilling out having a great evening big bonfire at night i mean

don't camp close drive 15 miles come on you know don't you think oh yeah it depends on if you're if you're uh backpacking up at their foot or horse and you just got you you waller out of bed and you throw your one man tent up and you're in there and you're cooking all that and you're staying quiet you can you can get fairly close and there's reasons for wanting to do that you want to you don't want to have to hike in the morning you don't want to have to sweat your guts out hiking a mountain and then get up there and freeze your guts out when you're trying to sit there in glass there's reasons for all that and you maybe want to you're having a quiet camp yeah you want to beat beat other people i mean there's a lot of reasons like that you may want to just kind of throw throw out there close but

um we've even some of the deer we've hunted on the henrys it's not by nature it or and even you in nevada jason even on some of your governor tags you've you've packed in and stayed overnight in some of these places it's not a traditional backpacking area but you know you want to you want to be in there till dark you know and you don't want to hike out an hour hour and a half and get back up and do the same thing so you'll take a primitive camp and we've gotten away with it and it beats beats you the punch sometimes it keeps you fresher keeps a client fresher if we're guiding somebody then going in and out every day so you got to kind of weigh all those types of things out um but be very quiet we don't hardly ever build a fire we never hardly build a fire there until you're celebrating something but if you are going to build a fire and you are going to have a loud camp go do

it just just be willing to get up a little bit earlier drive a little more it's not the end of the world and a lot of guys want to save gas and they want to sleep that you know every last five minutes and lay in bed and whatever so and and and and okay you know do whatever you got to do but uh we're not gonna we never run the risk of blowing out a deer by camping on top of them whatever it is if you're got your canvas cutter whatever you're doing it does not matter what you're doing do not sleep on top of the deer um as best you can as best you can now we camp pretty close to your deer uh on the henry's and it wasn't that far but yeah it wasn't we also didn't have loud camps well and it was also in an area you know part of the area there were there were roads we knew we weren't you know if we stayed out of there it didn't mean somebody else wasn't going

to drive into that area as well you know so if you got a basin and it's roadless it's a little bit different than if you're on a mountain with you know people driving up and down it all the time the deer are used to that the deer if they're used to habits and four-wheelers and all that run down like that and generate it's not going to bother them do that it's when they have never heard that type of stuff you got to be really sensitive when i say never they're not living around that on a daily basis you can't you can't do you don't want them to notice something new that that's the best way to put it probably so yep you don't want to you don't want to be able to just roll out you're going to roll out of bed and throw up your red rock precision and freaking dump a buck you know which i guess you could do anymore these guns are shooting a thousand yards plus so anyway by the way

we do we do own red rock precision rifles adam and i've bought them ourselves with our own money it's not something we've been given and and whatnot where we are a great supporter of them they're a great supporter of us and we know their guns shoot i know adam's dealt with them a lot uh uses their gun in fact in fact adam you'll even have your clients leave their gun at home at times and just use your gun because you've got it so dialed and um and know that they're going to kill a sheep or buck or whatever it is you guys are chasing and and the same thing with me i know when i dial in yeah it's set and they're awesomely weighted super lightweight for for being able to shoot like they do it's pretty unbelievable so if you have any questions at red rock you can sure visit them at redrockprecision.com or you can call 801-391-7840 so yep awesome guns they they flat out kill stuff and

anyway we appreciate um everybody that's it for now in terms of questions that were submitted um you know some of them were somewhat duplicate so if you didn't hear your specific question read we felt maybe it was similar to one of the other ones and probably could be answered in a similar way and but we really appreciate that this was you know something we didn't know where we'd go and and glad to just talk about our perspective and things like that and give our two cents doesn't mean we're the gospel and just speaking from our experience and we realize a lot of today was about mule deer and it's there's so much variation from canada to mexico and everywhere in between of differences and stuff that doesn't apply and people asking trail cameras and what you know and uh glassing what's the glassing because they're hunting thick forested stuff and we we get it so but we

do a whole podcast on all those individual items we could do a whole podcast on cameras in fact we should do one on how to set them up what to use the ones we like well i mean the whole the whole thing and it's not again it's just giving you guys a starting point a lot everybody has their own ways of doing things and whatnot but uh we there's tons of we and one thing even though today seemed a lot about mule deer uh wasn't like we pick and choose different questions and did this like chris has pretty much thrown every question that we've gotten out on the table um maybe storing up a for another podcast at a later date so anybody that has any questions uh feel free to hit us up dm us pm us email us whatever you know all those other things and crazy ways you can get a hold of us and we'll definitely uh you know throw them up here and visit about them a little bit as long as they're

respectful and and uh legitimate questions let's see should we give something away christopher we should give something away he says what are we going to give away today we do have a bino harness we have a bino harness it's kind of a prototype from under armor throw something out there that you can't buy you can't buy this item uh it's pretty cool it's one that some of you seen me use uh this last year in a few instagram posts and whatnot a bino harness of course we're always going to throw in something with from epic throw a hat and a decal and a bino harness should we do that all right so let's do that um kind of cool to give something away just a little something something for everybody that listened to the very end what promo code should we use bronson that's a deer podcast how about 200 incher okay 200 incher no i don't know what do you think just

200 to 2-0-0-2-0-0 you throw in 2-0-0 go to epic outdoors.com go to our podcast page it's probably backslash podcast backslash i don't know what it is but anyway epic outdoors podcast page be a promo code enter 200 200 and uh we're going to do a random thing we chris usually gives them away within a week so uh you're safe at least for the next five days yeah throw something up let's all get it in there today is april 5th this podcast will be coming at you tonight chris works around the clock for these and we appreciate him want to throw out yeah another another shot if you guys have ideas for us to get guests on we've had a lot of a lot of people suggest guests that we've then got some of them we've thought of some of them we haven't and so if there's somebody you are interested in maybe having

a sit down with chatting with getting to know better talking hunting tactics or things like that with uh give us a shout there too chris chris at epic outdoors.com email them to them um that time of year we're kind of getting into starting to do um maybe starting to gather your your gear um getting some new gear things like that if you're considering boots this year i want to put a plug into one of our our longtime sponsors uh at kennetrek jim wenjaman and his crew there produce some great mountain hunting boots they have a large selection of boots um desert guide mountain guides uh the new mountain guide series has a stiffer outsole deeper lugs and 400 grams of thin slates so check it all out at kennetrek.com k-e-n-e-t-r-e-k dot com got our other lineup on there or they they have ads in our magazine so if you're a member of epic outdoors you'll be able to see the new products and

the new stuff that they got there check them out i appreciate their support i just got a new pair of kennetreks i'm super excited to start in on them so anyway that's about it is there anything else you think of chris or adam all right guys till next time we're out