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, 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 Armour. Hey everybody, Jason Carter and Adam Bronson here with another podcast coming at you from Epic Outdoors. I don't I don't know what number we're on, 60 or 70, probably, probably closer to 70. But anyway, just pumping them out here. We do have 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. 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. You know, we'll just kind of do it spontaneous. It's not like we've studied for this stuff. We're just gonna 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 gonna get. Before we get started, I want to thank Under Armour 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've got to test it in the field and get aggressive with it, but we expect good things. So, anyway, thanks to Under Armour for all they've done for us. Thanks to a lot of our other 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 us, as well as you guys out there listening. We hear a lot from you, and we love it, and we appreciate it. Thanks for listening, and a lot of your comments on the side on what direct message or whatever you call it, PMs, DMs, whatever. So, 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. It was April 3rd. The New Mexico draw results, we expect to be out pretty soon. So, So, won't be too long on that. And then Nevada's obviously due 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. You can go in there and change your choices as many times as you want. It doesn't cost you anything. Just some cool things about it. But 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 do that and get everything in.

Again, of course, the drying 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 want to read off the first question? All right, this is from Jason, and he says, Huge fan of the show, when I'm in the office here at Phonescope, I constantly listen to your stuff. I've listened to the Randy Ulmer podcast at least 50 times. 50. Yeah, that's a lot. I wonder if he's working. You think Cheston's getting good work out of him? I don't know. Hopefully, he's not turning himself in by writing this question in to us. But anyway, he says, keep up the good work. But he says, 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, 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. If you're hunting in August and September, that's going to totally be different than maybe like the second, third, fourth 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, and you're covering the numbers. So, I don't know. What do you think, Adam? Should we break it down like, say, it's August, September? Yeah, since it's better. Artry, August, yeah. Start that way.

So, anyway, yeah, so it's going to vary. I guess, you know, as far as August, I'll take August here, August, September, you know, these early season bucks. You've heard it a hundred times from both of us here, scouting and patterns kill deer, patterns kill deer. And so, if you're going to, if you have time to pattern a buck, definitely you're going to be, you know, you're going to 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 going to want to hunt early. 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,

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, you scout for them. Here in Utah, we've got a lot of early seasons and what not. 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, anyway, when you go early, you're obviously, you know, you're going to be glassing a lot. Glassing is huge, it's paramount, as well as trail cameras if you're in kind of an area where you can, 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, trail cameras are quite popular, and we use them too. We use them heavy. We love them, but we glass heavy too. 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 gonna 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 it prompts you to start glassing. All right, he's here somewhere. I gotta lay eyes on him. I gotta find out where's 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. Every deer we've ever killed there, we've glassed up and found that way. And so, trail cameras is not the type of unit that we find deer for the first time on a camera. And 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 ability to trail camera bucks is going to go up and get a higher inventory of bucks that way. If you're hunting mountain units, trail camera and water is not going to beat, you're not going to get the biggest segment of the bucks hitting water.

Because there's too much water, there's streams, there's little seeps and stuff everywhere. You'll get them, and you can help supplement it that way, but you're probably going to have to glass them up to find out what's there. Yeah, I think, too, to add on to what you're saying is, 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 Poncagant versus a rifle tag on the Henrys, you can hunt scouted bucks on the Henrys with a rifle. Yes, you are.

So, conversely, Poncagant... They're gonna move. And so, you're not gonna scout as much. No. 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 Poncagant 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 to that, and year by year, you can occasionally find a deer on the northern end of 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 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. 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 important that way by the rifle hunt patterns can change. I think too, of course, Colorado's on the brain. Glad that it's over. Everybody should be in and applied for that. 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 2, they're not going to migrate a ton. Like the plains in Colorado, you're not going to,

You're not gonna, 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 planning on, you know, drawing a 35 tag, or an 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, I don't know why that's on my brain today, but anyway, you know, you're You could pre-scout that a little bit, but the rut does change things. Things walk around, move around a little bit. You know, we have seen things like Nevada down in 27. 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 hunt. But it's not a bad idea to throw out some cameras early season. It wouldn't totally hurt. So, I guess what the long and short of it is, Adam, what do you think? Like, you got to figure out what unit you're hunting, then you got to figure out your vegetation, and then you got to 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. Yeah, 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 and Nevada, trail camera

Cameras can be key early on. There's other places like that we hunt, Idaho, obviously Colorado, places like that that we don't live. We go and 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. Alright, well hopefully that kind of helps a little bit. A little bit of everything. You've got to be prepared to do everything. We'll even sit in tree stands if we absolutely have to. Anyway, I think it's just a matter of figuring out, you know, long-range glass and short-range glass. Are you going to use the BTXs that Kent's have? It's Kent's Optics or what you're going to do. So, anyway, I guess speaking of BTXs, I know they've been kind of hard to find. They've been out of stock.

Our buddies there at Kent's Optics are good dudes, and they have some of the best prices of anywhere we've seen. So, they're up in northern Utah, up in Tremont. You can give Dave Harrow a call. His number's 435-257-7014. He says if you tell him Jason and Adam sent ya, 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 take to try to get him tagged. Bowhunting in particular, obviously with the rifle, the process is shortened exponentially. I know you have to find him first, that's obviously the first step. Give me steps two through maybe five hundred and how you go about scouting. Where you start and once you find him, how do you follow him, etc.

Thank you, Brady. I don't know. Jump into that one. Well, I guess we'll just kind of talk about bow hunting because that's kind of where he went because it is different 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 wait for them to bed. 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 hunt differently that way. You want to beat him to the tree line, intercepting that way. But for me, it's usually watching bed in a spot. You know, if it's a unit that'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 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. Sometimes you get thunderstorms that come up and ruin it, and deer gets up and moves because you were too patient, and that happens. But 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 be in that first bed for less than an hour sometimes. They 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 do you think? Yeah, and I think you're exactly right. I think the biggest thing, a lot of times, when they bed, you know where they're at.

Yeah, you can keep a buddy or somebody watching them. Yeah, they're watching them and keeping you posted on that, but when you bed, you know where they're at, and they're stationary. The downside is they're just chilling. I mean, they're really keenly aware of their surroundings. And so, sometimes, I know we found that, you know, you'll bed them once, 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 we talked about this with Randy Ulmer 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.

Anyway, sometimes, depending, if you get that strong wind, and you get it in your favor, and you can get close, 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 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 to switch sides 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 do run a chance of that wind switching within a three, four hour period, and him getting your wind. And so, every situation's 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 both had our bows and hands running dead sprints before. Trying to beat... And it's not pretty. No, and you're running, you're huffing, puffing, because you know the deer is at 600-800 yards away, and you're doing a big circle loop to get on the tree line. And you know that is 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, 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 should. But anyway, Chris was with me to video it, and we knew he didn't go to water. We knew 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 done things more aggressively because I saw, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe he's there. And I need to try to kill him because that's a vulnerable spot, you know.

And if you're hunting, I think it's a different too, 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, early September. And where we hunt in southern Utah and Nevada, you have thundershower, monsoons, and that's a big dynamic that can change from daylight, you could have no clouds, and by noon, 2 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 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.

You know, we both hunted, we had an archery deer tag together. When was that? 2002 in Nevada. 2012. 2012, sorry. I knew there was a two in there somewhere. Not that long ago, but yeah, we each hunted like 14, I hunted I think 14 days, you hunted 18 days. We both went down swinging on that hunt. We swam. That was the most terrible hunt in the world. But we hunted patiently. We hunted a couple of deer the whole hunt, and we bounced them a couple of times, and we'd see them every two to three days. We'd see the bucks, and there were long days in between. When you didn't glass them up in the morning and you had nothing to hunt, it was a long, hot, miserable, sitting in the trailer at 105 with the AC on, hoping your generator didn't die.

But, 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 a deer, because, yeah, you can't just sit there and hunt a deer passively in a situation when you've got people buzzing around everywhere, things like that. So, your situation's gonna dictate, you know, how rapidly you go through steps two to five hundred. And there might not be 500, there might be three steps. Remember that one time when that AZ buck, we called him AZ, I don't know why, but he was bedded on that big old rock ridge, that hogsback, and I think you went down and got right above it like it could have been over, right? There wasn't really a lot to that. It 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... Out across the moonscape. Moonscape, remember? Didn't know we were there. He was just like, I'm moving. And it was hot, and we're like... Why'd you do that? 20 minutes later, he'd have been dead, probably. Yes. And... 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 frickin' pounded us with rain, and you're still sitting there? Yeah, and 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 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 a lucky position. 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, 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 you slap your release on your string, or arrows, or whatever. There's just lots of little things. Your killing process has to be simple.

That has to be refined. That stuff is the stuff all you do back at your house. You're shooting, you're ranging, you're 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 making the advance on the deer. That's right. But you're gear, and you have to mentally think, one last thing, one last thing. 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 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 had just been patient, I'd have killed 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. Just do not take note, assume nothing. Make the stock till the very end, and then if you walk up to his bed and he's freaking gone, then he's freaking gone. But make sure you follow that through to the end. 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 Kent. 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 a 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, in August, a deer will tolerate a lot more bumping. Generally, you can hunt, and that's nice, because when you're hunting with a bow, usually you don't kill him the first time you try to stalk in on him. 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 I'd like to see him, but I think it depends on the time of year. You'll see a deer a lot more, and maybe hunt him every day, some days with a bow. If you have it, 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? Deer drives, good old Southern Utah deer drives.

And even like you talk about Wyoming G, 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 I think the time of year is probably the biggest thing. When you start getting, in my experience, you start getting into October, and you start bumping deer then... You might not see him again. You might not. They start becoming and acting different. Yeah, make sure you 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 from back in the eastern plains of Colorado say that, you know, he made every single stock count its first time, clients It's included and never has had to stalk twice. I don't know anybody else that's that capable. That efficient. I'm not. Can you handle the... I mean, there's weather. There's all kinds of variables that aren't in your control. And maybe you'd bump a doe, and he bumps a buck, and she bumps a buck. There's just a lot of things that happen. So, 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, 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 rubbed, they're just feeding and bedding, they're not thinking of does, 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 at the brink of when they'd be starting to drift to an area to rut anyway, and they're like, alright, I'm out of here. You know, I'm gonna start slowly drifting. So, it definitely It depends on the time of year, 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've ruined it. And those are specific situations. But overall, you'd have a little more opportunities earlier season. Later on, later on, you could be done. And very, very, very frustrating, I gotta say.

Alright, next question. We 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. The number one thing, yeah, if you know a deer is big, I don't ever give up. I've gone for weeks and weeks without seeing that deer, and then all of a sudden, boom, there he is. And so, for whatever reason, especially if you're on public land, there's a lot of other people out there, hikers, naturalists, four-wheelers, ATVers, they could blow them. You see them on one weekend, go back the next week, you don't know what all has happened and transpired.

There are guys just running through horses, or people cutting trails on the Forest Service, burning chainsaws. It doesn't matter. Stuff can interrupt them. But if I know a deer is there, and this doesn't matter if it's a... even like on the Henry Mountains, which a lot of people say, oh, these are a lot of big deer, blah, 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. But, you know, that's a very open glassable unit. But you get it later. There's times I've gone two, 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, and 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 that you want him, don't give up. You don't give up. Until you get too late into the year,

and then if he's gonna drift to the winter range or something, then yeah, you gotta pull the plug at some point. Yeah, and he could be lion shiz. Yeah. But you gotta, if he's big enough, you take that chance. That he's not. And so, I think too, one part of this is, 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 them. A lot of people 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. I mean, yourself. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're going to need to trade trucks four and five times instead of once. You know what I mean? To try to keep it. It's just the way it goes out here. So, I think overall, don't check on him. 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. Backup. Backup bucks. And so, in the velvet, in the summer, they are not going to move unless something crazy comes in. A lion moves in, a lion, a pride of lions, whatever, moves in, and move him off the water, you're screwed, okay?

He's going to move four or five miles, possibly. Depends on where the next water is 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 gotten. Fine. Do it a couple of times. Don't freak out when you don't see him. Just keep freaking pounding the unit. One and 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've got narrow tunnel vision. Well, 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 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 or looking for. But then I'm always, you know, reminded when you go somewhere and boom, you find a big buck right out of the gate. And, alright, 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. Yes, that's what I mean, yes. But all the times we'll go back to the unit, and I'll go back there four or five days in a row,

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, 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. So, that plays into it as well. But, bottom line, if you know a big deer is there, and it's in that earlier fall, and he's not going to be moving to run or 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 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 again. 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. 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. Yep, and if you have a friend or something like that, and you know a buck's there, a family member, you know, 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, and there are situations where, yeah, you find a buck in July, and he gets killed by a lion before bow hunt. But those are going to be rare. You just, don't chalk it up to that until you find him dead. That's right. All right. All right. 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? Or, is it better to just save your fuel and wing it and try to locate as many does as you can while on your hunt since the bucks are always on the move checking does? This is from Quincy. 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, right? We never can draw. We don't have any. I don't know, a Dolores Triangle rifle deer is like it. Maybe down a little ponce here and there. A little bit on the ponce. These light muzzles on the general, but... Yep, but for the most part, no, we don't scout. Any scouting would be simply to learn the unit, and a lot of cyber scouting, you call it that, with studying your maps, talking to people who 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, I knew I was going to draw my max points in Arizona, and so the year before, I went to the Kyobab 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 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 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. This is good. 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 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 my opinion. Cover does like we did on my 12B hunt. Yep. We went out and knew where the does were, and we each split up, us three. Yeah. Split up, 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, heard of a deer rutting in a certain area one winter, or you see him personally show up on, you know, let's take some of these late muzzleloaders in Utah on the general units. There's a specific 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 In similar weather, they're going to probably get killed.

Well, they moved 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 here locally, we do know specific bucks, and everybody's waiting for them to show up to rut, to show up 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 absolutely glassing high numbers of deer. Yep, that's right. So, anything to add that we've kind of skipped over on that one? Nope. I think we pretty well crushed it. Alright, go to the net. Let's see, where are we at here? Let's see, question. Once a buck reaches 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 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 age and addicts, feed conditions, obviously. And we all talk about 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, no winter. Zero winter. This winter, yeah. But it's, and so yeah, they are healthy and whatnot, and you do have that summer feed carrying into fall, if there was rain in the fall and all that. And then, but the one thing you can't quantify is how old that deer is, and what's his true potential. So, 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 the Henry's is kind of a higher elevation, not this total bottom desert that we're hunting in some places. And you notice the difference

in antler growth as an average. And then you'll have some bucks. Last year, we had some freaking weird desert buck blew up to 250 or 60 inches 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 step on a stick wrong? Has he got some kind of, you know... Infection. Yeah, who knows? Yeah, the antler growth will always be secondary to their body. 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 normal. Ty, 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 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 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 our lifetime. Yeah. It's moisture and feed driven out there. It's drought. That's what hurts deer grow. And they have genetics, the best genetics in the world. They're going to have age because they have limited entry deer quotas. So, if they have the feed, 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 some years that we talk about it like, we thought this year was going to be incredible here and there, and it just seems to be all right, you know. So, you can't predict it But, yeah, my suspicion 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 heavy winter. Some of the states like that are prone to it. They're gonna take a while to get back on their feet, so to speak, before they start growing. And by then, they've lost a month or month and a half of prime antler growing time. Yeah, and we've also seen where, well, like 2012, we hate talking about it because it was so bad that we legitimately knew We drew a few of one deer that was over 200 inches, and they killed him. He was 207.

Anyway, and what a study. It was 230s, high 230s the year before 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 was a 440-inch type bull. He was probably living on some wet little riparian spring or whatever. So, there are things, I guess, just saying, don't just give up. If it's a terrible year, there's something out there in some condition, some year of a buck's life, and for one reason or another, he's awesome, even though the average may be down. Why don't you read this one? This one kind of sounds like for you. I haven't even read it yet.

I haven't even read it yet. I haven't even read it. So, after looking for 10 years on the desert for mule deer and 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, and I'm looking for some knowledge. I'm nervous. 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. If you see tracks, deer make tracks, and so you've got to figure that out. Somehow, you've got to find where they're watering. If it's desert, there's limited water.

There's some cases that there are streams, and it's tough to trail camera streams and whatnot, but put cameras on there. You start to figure out what deer are there, then you can glass and figure out where they're going after they feed and water all night. If you can't trail camera it, then you're glassing. And they're making tracks, and so there's deer there. I think you just need to glass your freaking guts out. 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 kind of get a little breath of fresh air, so to speak, They can enjoy some air conditioning. They can't. 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. You might even, 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 figure out where they're going. Track them down. 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 were going to see, and maybe it 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 I don't know the whole situation, but they're there somewhere. Yeah, I agree with all that. I guess the one determination, and this sometimes is an easy determination, sometimes it's not, is to try to decide if these deer are resident deer there, versus, alright, 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. 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 poncegonde 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 Arizona, parts of the desert there, they're probably, or Utah, parts of the core desert, parts of Utah, they're living there somewhere, and there may be nomadic seasonal uses of parts of that desert. But if you got an area like that, 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, alright, it 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 looks like it doesn't have good groceries, good feed and all that, but it's the desert, right? It looks like crap. It 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 you said, and generally you get 90% of them are migrational deer, and then you got a 10% that are chilling out and will be there in the summer.

And so, anyway, you may never see him again. That is true. Depending on where you're at, you may never see him again. But generally speaking, you know, you come back, you know, January through March of that next year, you're going to 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 at Epic Outdoors. That's QU. Makes some awesome gear, wide variety of gear, very advanced mountain hunting equipment. They have everything from base layers, outerwear, awesome packs, sleeping bags, tents, boots, accessories, everything like that. They all sell direct on their website at QUIU.com, no retail markup, great gear. We've had it since the first versions of it. They've come a long way, great supporters of us at Epic Outdoors for the beginning. So, check it out.

Awesome. Alright, well, we're running in here. Last question. 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 interesting how close people will camp to the game they're hunting. And, you know, if you're going to have a nice, loud camp, you're going to have people coming and going, driving in and out, running a generator. Some guys like drinking beer, chilling out, having a great evening. Big bonfire at night. I mean, it's very easy. Don't camp close. Drive 15 miles. Come on. You know, don't you think, Adam? Oh, yeah. It depends on if you're, if you're backpacking up at their foot or horse, and you just got to go. 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 get fairly close, and there's reasons for wanting to do that. 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 other people. I mean, there's a lot of reasons like that. You may want to just kind of throw out there close. But we've, even some of the deer we've hunted on the Henry's, it's not by nature. And even you in Nevada, Jason, even on some of your governor tags, 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 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 you the punch.

Sometimes it keeps you fresher, keeps the client fresher, if we're guiding somebody, than going in and out every day. So, you got to kind of weigh all those types of things out. Yeah. 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 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. And okay, do whatever you gotta do. But we never run the risk of blowing out a deer by camping on top of them. Whatever it is, if you've got your canvas cutter, whatever you're doing, it does not matter what you're doing. Do not sleep on top of the deer.

As best you can. As best you can. We camp pretty close to your deer on the Henry's, and it wasn't that far. But we also didn't have loud camps. Well, it was also in an area, you know, part of the area, 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 running down like that and generate, it's not going to bother them to do that. 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, you don't want them to notice something new. 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 of, you know, 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 own Red Rock Precision Rifles. Adam and I have bought them ourselves with our own money. It's not something we've been given and whatnot. 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, uses their gun. 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 know that they're going to kill a sheep or buck or whatever it is you guys are chasing. And the same thing with me. I know when I dial in, it's set, and they're awesomely weighted, super lightweight 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. Yep, awesome guns. They flat-out kill stuff. Anyway, we appreciate everybody. That's it for now in terms of questions that were submitted. 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. But we really appreciate that. This was, you know, something we didn't know where we'd go,

and glad to just talk about our perspective and things like that, and give our two cents. It doesn't mean we're the gospel. And just speaking from our experience, and we realized 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 glassing, what's the glassing? Because they're hunting thick forested stuff, and we get it. We could 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. I mean, the whole thing. And it's not, again, it's just giving you guys a starting point. Everybody has their own ways of doing things and whatnot. But there's tons.

And one thing, even though today seemed a lot about mule deer, it wasn't like we pick and choose different questions and did this. Chris has pretty much thrown every question that we've gotten out on the table, maybe storing up a few for another podcast at a later date. So, anybody that has any questions, feel free to hit us up. DM us, PM us, email us, whatever, all those other things and crazy ways you can get a hold of us, and we'll definitely throw them up here and visit about them a little bit, as long as they're respectful and legitimate questions. Let's see, should we give something away, Christopher? Yes, we should. 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 that's kind of a prototype from Under Armour. Throw something out there that you can't buy.

You can't buy this item. It's pretty cool. It's one that some of you have seen me use this last year in a few Instagram posts and whatnot. A bino harness, of course, we're always going to throw in something from Epic, throw a hat and a decal and a bino harness. Should we do that? All right, so let's do that. Kind of cool to give something away, just a little something-something for everybody. Everybody that listened to the very end, what promo code should we use, Bronson? How do you spell it? It's a deer podcast. How about 200-incher? Okay. 200-incher. No, I don't know. What do you think? Just 200. 200. 200. You throw in 200, go to epicoutdoors.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, via promo code, enter 200. 200.

And we're gonna do a random thing. Chris usually gives them away within a week, so you're safe at least for the next five days. To 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. I want to throw out, yeah, another shot. If you guys have ideas for us to get guests on, we've had a lot of people suggest guests that we've then got. Some of them we've thought of, some of them we haven't. So, if there's somebody you're interested in maybe having a sit down with, chatting with, getting to know better, talking hunting tactics or things like that with, give us a shout there too. Chris, chris, at epicoutdoors.com, email them to them. That time of year, we're kind of getting into, starting to do, maybe starting to gather your gear, getting some new gear, things like that.

If you're considering boots this year, I want to put a plug in to one of our long-time sponsors at Kennetrek, Jim Windjaman and his crew there produced some great mountain hunting boots. They have a large selection of boots, desert guide, mountain guides. 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.com. We've got all their lineup on there, or 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 Kenetrex. I'm super excited to start in on them. So, anyway, that's about it. Is there anything else you can think of, Chris or Adam? All right, guys. Till next time, we're out.