No Excuses Hunting: Beating Negativity and Finding Success This Season | Solo Round

Foreign. To the Hunt West Podcast. Here's your host, Jaden Bales. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Hunt West Podcast. Today we're road dogging it and I'm really curious how this is going to turn out because I'm just going to be flying off the cuff here. I am really, really excited for this fall hunting season and I'm so stoked that so many people have been reaching out in DMS or text or give me calls or emails and asking some final little bits and questions. But one thing that continuously comes up is oftentimes people hearing something negative or getting in their own head or losing motivation right before the hunt, thinking like, oh my gosh, I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I don't know if this is going to be worth the trip. I don't know if there's going to be animals to chase. And I wanted to go off on a bunch of common questions, a bunch of common naysayer things that happen, and kind of go over some really good kind of responses to a lot of the negativity that you might normally hear when you're talking to people about hunting elk and deer across the. Excuse me, about hunting elk and deer across the west in particular. We're just focusing on elk and deer. I might sprinkle in a little bit about pronghorn as well, just because being based in Wyoming, obviously we have a lot of that conversation going on, especially on the tale of a drought that reduced populations on the east side and a winter kill that reduced populations on the west side. But I just spent the last handful of days scouting and I'm really positive. I think one of the most important things if you're going to get anything from this podcast is a message of positivity just in whatever hunt that you're going on. I also really want to impart a message of no excuses. I think when things get tough when you're hunting this fall, you're going to find every excuse to quit. You're going to find every excuse to blame someone else or something else for why you're not finding the animals that you want or why you're not having the success that you wish or thought you would prior to the hunting season. First and foremost, western big game hunting on public land or using public access is frickin hard. Unless you draw a really spectacular tag. Usually the public land hunting that you can expect every year is really hard. That is just the start, the finish, the standard. This is what you should come to expect when you're coming out to any of these Rocky Mountain states, whether it's Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, any of these states that have opportunity type hunts, you should come to expect a difficult time to go out and find especially a mature animal. That's our baseline, right? Part of the reason why we love coming out west and why we love hunting like we do is because it pushes us. It pushes us mentally and physically. It pushes our gear, pushes our skills, and that's baked into the experience. Now, obviously, if you're paying for access, you're paying for an outfitter or guide, you're going to curb that a little bit. But even then, I have the great, great fortune of guiding some of the best hunts in Wyoming. And even then, they're a mental, physical and emotional grind almost every time. Oftentimes what happens is as the quality of the tag, the quote unquote quality of the tag goes up, expectations rise proportionately with it. And so instead of having an opportunity hunt and being like, man, I'd be great with a rag horn, they go, oh, I've got a quality tag, so I've got to shoot a next level bull. And they don't get to appreciate the fact that there's raghorns running around everywhere. Or when it's a buck hunt, they don't appreciate the fact that there's a ton of mature but not good scoring bucks running around everywhere and every single time. It's like these western hunts fall just short of what people's hyped up expectations are coming in. Matter of fact, most times it doesn't matter what type of draw it is or how it goes. Most people find a good reason in their mind to make this hunt less than what they expect. I totally reject that idea. I reject that notion and substitute my own. If that sounds familiar, that was like a line from Mythbusters. I reject your reality and substitute my own. The reason why I do that is because I've been on enough of these hunts to say, look, I don't actually care what other people say. This hunt has been like, I'm going to go out there and take all the different challenges and try to identify what, what are they going to be long before I ever step field on the mountain or in the prairie or on the desert. And I'm going to identify those challenges and have backup plans and I'm going to have contingencies for when shit goes south. I think the only consistent thing that someone should plan for is for your plans to go south when you are out. Western big game Hunting, even if you have private land access. And it's one of the reasons why I don't spend a ton of time looking for private land access, there are going to be factors that play in that make it so that your hunt is not what you expect. For instance, right now, across the west, we've had a bunch of fires flare up. Bunch of fires flared up in Wyoming, Bunch of them flared up in Wyoming or in Montana, A bunch of them have been flaring up and mostly are put out in Utah and in Arizona as well. Whenever those wildfires come in, that totally gives everyone who has a tag in those areas an immediate out as to why they didn't have success that year. And I think that is baloney. In particular, if you are someone who has a tag in an area that has a wildfire coming in, you should be prepared to make adjustments. As long as the whole unit isn't shut down, you should be prepared to make adjustments to your hunting strategy and have enough of the area e scouted that you have backup plans. This happened back in 2020. There was the mullen fire in south central Wyoming in the snowy range. And I had a friend of mine who had a deer tag down there, and he was just so debating turning it in. Damn near all of the public land in that unit was burnt up for the majority of what people expect as the standard, you know, places you hunt mule deer. But my buddy said, well, I think I'm just going to send it anyway. I've got another plan. I've got some areas I want to check out down low. And he ended up shooting a sweet buck on it. My first backpack deer hunt. I went in, and my buddy and I were going to go to this basin that he had done all the work. He had scouted. He had found some bucks. He knew he wanted to go in there. And as we're driving up, there's a fire on the other side of this wilderness that had shut down the whole wilderness. And therefore, we couldn't legally get into the basins that he had scouted. What'd we do? Well, we went to a plan B spot, and despite a bunch of other factors, we got into this place. It was a. It was a son of a gun. We didn't know the trail. It took us way longer. We didn't know where good glassing knobs were. And this was one of the quintessential moments when I realized backup plans. And having really good backup plans laid out is critical in western big game hunting. But we went into this backup plan that My buddy had. And we didn't do a whole bunch of great preparation for it, but we knew we could go in there and there might be some critters in there. And sure enough, first morning we wake out of our, wake up out of our tents, we're late getting to the glassing knob, and we bump a sweet buck as we get up to the glassing knob and we're like, oh, man, there were deer in here too. This also is the same thing with elk hunting. I'm just using a couple of deer hunting examples because right now it's kind of fresh on my mind. I was just doing a bunch of scouting, and as I was scouting, I could see plumes of smoke off in the distance. And I was just like, boy, anybody who has had done some deer scouting in those areas is going to be super bummed that the BLM land or the state land or the private land that they had access to is now shut down. And I hope they had backup plans because they're going to need them. This is all kind of surrounding wildfires right now. You know, oftentimes what we talk about for elk hunters who have a wildfire problem is essentially, well, the forest is torched, like all the upper timber is torched. I don't know what I'm going to do. And I think people oftentimes forget that you have a lot of elk herds that are using private land down in the river bottoms, the valley bottoms, and are feeding there on their places at night and then are going up into the lower public land, know, lower elevation stuff on public land. Having backup plans, doing enough research beforehand to figure out where those places are is critical. I don't think enough people are thinking about that because inevitably, whether it's this year or next year or five years down the road, you're going to have a wildfire somewhere in the West. Just totally jack up your hunting plans. And it's to be expected at this point. So what are you going to do when that happens? This is also, you know, I think it's really important. I'm struggling to put this to words. It's really important to take what I'm saying about wildfires in particular into consideration with the fact of safety. Now, if there's a wildfire and you're going to go in on your backup plans or your, your plans and it's going to be unsafe, obviously don't do that, right? Don't just try to find a loophole. Find some private land that's just outside of a, of a wildfire. That's burning and go get burnt up. That's not what I'm trying to say. Most of the time what you'd find is even a hundred thousand acre fire might only touch a fifth of the unit. And you can go to different areas within the unit and still have a great hunt. Then you also run into folks who say, well, the pressure on the other parts of the unit is going to be crazy. Well, it depends. You also have states that offer a refund process for people who are tag holders or they can defer to the next year. That's what happened last year in the elk fire in Area 38 in Wyoming. A lot of people deferred and they cut tags back this year. So it might look like there's fewer tags given out this year. But a lot of those folks rolled over. And if you looked on the map and found places to hunt during the Area 38 hunting season last year, that places you could get to that were around the fire, a ton of people had deferred their tags already and so there weren't as many people on the mountain at that time. Again, this is very specific. I'm trying to give you some specific examples so you can go look on the map and see what I'm talking about. But whether it's the elk fire or the Mullen fire that I just talked about, or you look at some of the eastern Oregon fires that have happened over the years, I've had some experience with those. This is something that's going to be common if you're an area 22 deer or elk tag holder and you see that the leaf fire has torched a quarter million acres or whatever it is at the time you're hearing this, having backup plans or opting to go hunt that in November when the fire's been put out and there's been little green grass shoots that have come up need to be part of what you're thinking about in preparation for your western beef game hunts. This is just kind of all, just part of the process of hunting out west. There's just so many variables. You cannot control. The other thing that can happen on your hunts and I think it demoralizes people, it throws them off their game and it sends them home packing. Is when you get a big snowstorm that comes through and you can't get your vehicle up to the places that you escout it, or you, you look at that snowstorm and you say, well, it's going to have pushed all the animals out and onto private land. So I should just Give up. I don't think that's the case at all. There's a couple reasons for that. One, chances are the animals are still up there and you just got to find some grit in order to get up there into the higher elevations where they are. This is especially the case when it comes to bull elk hunting in late seasons, whether it's October or November or heck, I do a lot of bull elk hunting in December and I'm going to the dang top of the mountain, you know, wading through waist deep snow and snow drifts to get up to where these bulls are hanging out on wind slept slopes. This is really important. And part of the preparation for that though is to think about if you do have a snowstorm coming through, or if you have the possibility of a snowstorm coming through, how am I going to be prepared to tackle that? Having change in your truck, having a spare shovel, having a good way to warm up, whether that's some extra firewood in the back or you've got a buddy heater that you can toss in your tent. I'm not saying sleep with it on, but I'm saying use something that can warm you up. Those are all things I'm thinking about, especially as you get into these October, November, December hunts. But I say that, man, we've had some gnarly snowstorms that have hit in September and I even got Snowed on on August 31st a couple years ago. So it can happen at any time. And so you have to be thinking about these contingencies. That way you don't have excuses when the snowstorm does roll in and everyone else is pushed off the mountain and you join them. Inversely, you got to be the person who sticks it out, stays up there or stays in the game and doesn't go home with just calling it tag soup. And as much as maybe our significant others or kids or whoever might be like excited to see you home five days early from your 10 day hunt, it's really, if you're focused on having meat in the freezer, if you're focused on having the, the best time possible and the most amount of chances of filling your tag in the way that you're looking to fill them, having contingency plans for when stuff goes south is, it should be the bare minimum, should be step one of building these plans out. So the other thing I hear all, all the time, and this is, this is oftentimes the case following a hard winter kill like we had in 2022, 2023 in Wyoming, in Colorado and in Montana, Idaho, Utah. But you'll hear people oftentimes say, man, the winter kill really decimated things. You know, it's not worth it. I hear I had dozens of people say this regarding pronghorn and regarding mule deer and regarding elk in all these states. I just mentioned after the 22, 23 winter kill. Well, if you look back at history, we've had winter kills every so often as long as time has existed. And I know people will say, well, we just once animal levels get to a certain level point, I don't feel good hunting them. And that's okay. If you, if that's where your line is and you draw that line out of emotion, that's great. But oftentimes I'm looking at the hunting regulations and acknowledging how the state agencies are adjusting them and going with the flow. And oftentimes I also will say if the population is not doing great, awesome. I'm just going to focus on taking the most mature animal I can and then I'm going to, or I'll go home, I'll go home empty handed. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to hunt crazy hard. It was that mentality that got me my oldest buck, which was a seven and a half year old deer that was really nice in archery season immediately following the winter kill. Not to mention the fact that immediately following the 22, 23 winter kill, I saw some of the best quality of bucks that I'd seen up until my this point in my hunting career. Were there quite as many? No. Where I was at, Maybe there was 25, 30% less of overall buck numbers, but that was coming upon three seasons ago now. So we've had chances to reproduce and when I say we, geez, just to take some, the wildlife have had a chance to reproduce. We showed some amazing reproductive rates last year following the, you know, two years after the winter kill. And as based on what I'm seeing, and this is very anecdotal, don't take this as the gospel and as the evidence that you're going to make all decisions on. But what I'm seeing on the ground this summer is that we're in for another really good year of reproductive rates, especially in, in pronghorn and in mule deer and a lot of places in Wyoming and Montana where I've been spending most of my time this summer. So again, I just, I just got this text too asking me, man, I have a south general Wyoming elk tag. What should I, I just keep hearing all this negative chatter on the Internet about the winterkill decimating the elk herd. And I just want to reiterate, this just makes my blood boil, man. If you haven't been on the ground hunting elk or looking at elk on the winter range. So since the winter kill, same with deer and pronghorn, but especially elk, you probably haven't taken into fact that our elk numbers in Wyoming and across the west are. If they're not at their highest, they're really, really dang close. Still just takes so dang much to winter kill an elk that even in the hardest hit places, you're still finding good, healthy herds of elk. Now I know like Colorado for instance, right across the border from the south region in Wyoming did make some drastic changes and they were running a pretty low bull ratio down there. So they just didn't want to keep applying that same over the counter pressure to an already low bull ratio. But people I know who've been down there hunting since still have had really great experiences and found mature animals. It's definitely not a scenario where you just throw your hunting plans out the window because someone on the Internet, a keyboard warrior who's never stepped foot on the ground, especially in the winter when they can actually see the animals, tells you that it's going to be bad. The other thing you'll oftentimes come into is someone will tell you, oh, there's no animals left in that unit. I haven't seen any critters in my spot for the last five years or 10 years or 20 years. Let me just say I grew up with this mentality all of my youth. It's like all the old timers I grew up around were like, ah, it's not worth hunting deer. There's none left. Or man, there's all the wolves ate all the elk, there ain't none of them left. You know, it's all screwed up. But then I would be like, well, I still want to go hunting. And I'd go out there and consistently still find elk, still find deer, still find animals to chase and oftentimes some age class that makes me really happy. This was like one of my favorite things that happened was back in 2017, it might have been earlier than that. 2015, my brother and I and his friend were going elk hunting. We were, we were coming up this ridge, bugling, and we look up and there's this guy that we know from town, he's sitting in a tree stand and he says, howdy boys. And we're like, hey Craig, what's going on? He's like, Oh, I haven't seen. All the elk are dead, the wolves ate them all, etc. Etc. And he's like, this hasn't been the same, you know, since the wolf reintroduction. I was like, oh, you know, it's kind of. I think all three of us were a little bit bummed because we know elks. Craig's a pretty good elk hunter. And we were like, God dang it, like, well, Craig, we'll get out of your hair. We're gonna go up to the high country and poke around up there. Not 30 minutes after leaving Craig, we sit down at a meadow to glass and these. This herd of elk with a bull in it comes walking right by us. And my brother's roommate shoots and actually wounds an elk, and then we spend the rest day looking for it. The next week was some of the best freaking elk hunting I've ever had in that area. And it was, you know, just immediately following a fella telling us all the wolves ate them all. And I'm not saying that he. The wolves haven't eaten their fair share. I'm not saying that things haven't changed drastically. And I'm certainly not saying that elk aren't quieter now than they were in the 80s or the 70s or the 90s even. What I am saying is as the landscape changes, but there's still animals that are visible on the landscape. Your approach to hunting and your preparation to hunting has to change with it. Whether that's a wildfire that comes in and totally alters an entire half of a unit, or it's a new predator on the landscape and animals are acting differently or they're just not as easy to call in. Or maybe it's just hunter pressure is just increased and all of the easy to access spots are covered up in folks. It's all baked into the ways that you can account for that and the ways that you can think about that happening long before the season ever starts. Even when you have over the counter general seasons, you can watch the trends of tag sales. I'm not even talking about just increased pressure that you know is unlimited or uncontrolled. You can watch trends and tag sales over time and see how things are changing and make adjustments to your game plan accordingly. One of the most interesting things that the hunting community has seen is a rise in people really complaining about hunter pressure while the hunter numbers are staying the same or decreasing. And oftentimes people are associating or the studies are associating that more with a lack of game than they are with the amount of people, when you are in the 80s and you had deer around every bush and everybody had two tags, two buck tags to fill, and you had four doe tags to fill, people didn't care that there was zillions of people driving roads and shooting critters. Largely, those people would go out, they'd get their animal, and they'd be done. But you'd know that opening day is an absolute gong show. There was this one mentor of mine. He was like a life mentor, a wrestling coach of mine, and he was also a really good old school hunter. And he swears to this day that part of the reason why people aren't as successful today in Oregon hunting mule deer is because there's not enough people running around to bump them into each other. So basically, he's saying, like, he grew up using the other hunter pressure to push deer and elk towards him so that he could get a shot without having to walk quite as far. And while I think that's kind of a funny way to think about the history of deer populations, elk populations, and. And human interaction, I also think that there's something to that. Back in 2019. No, it was 2018. It was before I had a tag in Wyoming. We were up hunting deer or hunting elk on a general tag, and we accidentally bumped into this fella who was sitting on a ridge. And we were going up to go after this elk that we heard. We didn't see him, but we asked the guy who was sitting on the ridge. We're sorry, we didn't mean to get in your area. We just had heard a bugle and started coming this way. He's like, oh, I heard that bugle too. He's like, go ahead, go up there. Push him down to me. He was like that. That's a tactic that seems to work really good in this country, especially when you consider that it's really thick and you can't see well. He was just. He was actually relying on people moving these elk around and get them shuffled up in order to get a shot at him. So that's all to say. If you've done your research beforehand, you. You can make adjustments and you can make plans based on the hunting pressure that you know is going to be there. All right, I'm all fired up. It was so funny. The other day, I was listening to a different podcast and they had a fellow on who was talking about drawing a limited entry archery deer tag in Utah. There were, I think, 50 tag holders or something. There was not very many deer deer tags. Hunters and this guy just kept telling stories after stories of these target buck seeds spent all summer scouting getting shot out from underneath them or getting bumped by people. And it's because all of those folks that were the tag holders, well they, whenever they drew they knew they had something. So they brought in every family member and every friend of theirs at the local gas station who likes to hunt deer. It was, they brought them into the unit too to go out there and, and help them hunt for deer. So this is not just an over the counter problem or a general problem. Matter of fact, some of my most secluded, best hunting experiences have been on general over the counter hunts. Some of the limited entry, limited quota, high end stuff. It gets all the eyeballs because everyone's out there looking for the top of the line critters and people hunt it hard and hunt it hard in teams. And it just feels like this is not the limited experience I'm looking for. But that's where if you knew that, if you did some good research before going into the hunt and not just look at the tag numbers, but talk to previous tag holders or get a sense of what's happening out there before you ever step foot in the unit, you can adjust for that, you can account for hunter pressure. For instance, I've got two deer hunters in one of the hardest to draw units in Wyoming this year. I'm really excited about it because there's, there's a lot of opportunity to go into a ton of different types of habitat. And there's also, it's like kind of a migration hunt, kind of a late rut hunt at the second half of the season or an early rut hunt, you know, basically pretty pre rut type staging behavior and bucks. And I'm looking at the surrounding units and I'm looking at how people will have hunted that first part of the month. And I'm like, okay, well if everyone who has scouted deer kills their deer, that they scout it, you know, if they did what I'm just got done doing and, and scouted out some bucks and then went in and shot them on the opener, the first, you know, opening weekend or the first week of season, what's going to happen next? And as I look at the map I go, well what's going to happen next is these general season units around it are going to open up and we're going to get snow and we're going to get critters getting pushed in from different units and maybe hunting the edges of these other units where animals are getting pushed in from is a good idea. There's a migration that comes into this unit, so maybe I can go hunt the border of the mic, the general area, expecting deer to have been pushed in from that area as well as expecting deer that have migrated from, you know, further up the mountain somewhere, and figure out how we can hunt new deer that have been, you know, pushed into the area and settled into where this tag is valid. The other thing I think about is like, okay, great. We've had two weeks of hunter pressure that will have existed in this unit before my hunters get there. Well, oftentimes when that happens, you get a bunch of pressure. You're going to get a lot of animals that get congregated onto private land. How am I going to use that to my advantage? Right. How am I going to look into the edges of private land and try to find a critter that's flirting with the boundary? I, this morning was just on a glassing knob that was overlooking a valley that was this great habitat. It was this creek bottom with really good, lush, tall brush. It's like really good deer country, but it's all private. And then up above it, there's some, like, scrubby pines and there's some deep sage draws and rocks. I'm like, this is perfect. You know, come October, especially after there's been hunting pressure, I'm going to be able to work this backwards. And if there's animals that have been pushed onto private, they're going to start trickling off a little bit and they could become accessible. And from this one glassing knob, I can glass both the private and the public and kind of get a sense of what animals are doing in the area. This goes back to just like this common, common naysayer energy about, well, the public ground is hammered. The only animals that are left are on private. You have two choices in that scenario. One, you go find out where animals have been pushed towards, AKA the private. Right. And you play the private public game. Sometimes, like when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If that's exactly what's happening, then you are at the mercy of what's happening on the ground in order to have success. And just accepting that as a fact is really important for the most part across the West. The west was settled basically using the homestead act, and people went out across the western landscape, found the best country to make a living and settled that and made it private land. What you're left with then is all this BLM and national forest that most of us love to hunt on. Is not the most lush grass, it's not the most riparian areas, it's not certainly the most covered. And therefore it just makes sense that animals would want to seek refuge on private land, even if there's not a ton of hunter pressure. So again, going back to thinking about the history of the west, not just the way that hunting is today, can really help you adjust your mindset for what to expect when you're out on a hunt. Okay, but let's just say, Jaden, I hate playing the public private game. I think that's stupid. Why? I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to wait for an animal step across a boundary. That's all right. Okay, cool. Like, you get to choose the type of experience you want. But if you're going to say, I'm not hunting the private public boundary and all of the public land is all shot out, you also have to think creatively about ways to access the public land that other people are not doing this. You know, we've talked about this on different podcasts and usually it's been in a species specific manner. But especially for a state like Colorado, like Montana, like Idaho, definitely Wyoming too, you got to be thinking about ways to get creative with the access. And that might mean that instead of taking the trailhead up the drainage, you're going to park along the side of a busy highway and you're going to put your waders on, wait across a big river, obviously be safe about this, right? Like, don't do something stupid and blame me for it, but wait across this river where it's knee deep and your waiters in November or October and then you're going to boot up 500ft up the other side of the canyon and get to a glassing knob just on the other side. And it's taking you 42 minutes to do so. And you're just prepared for that and you bake that into your morning schedule. Maybe that does mean that you go deep into the backcountry, but that is also a place where you need to have contingencies for other people who are thinking about the same thing. I was just listening to South Cox's Nevada Deer Hunt kind of semi live series he's doing. And it's a place that I've heard from multiple folks and then he talks about it there where the middle of the backcountry is really busy. Personally, if I was hunting that tag, I would probably either a not backpack hunt it because I know that's where there's so Much pressure and I would choose to day hunt it, or B, I would go in two weeks after the opener or 10 days after the opener because I know that's when the most pressure is going to be. I'm just going to totally write that zone off until later in the season when the people who have spent all their energy and time off in vacation have gone home already. It's not always the case that you can do that, especially when you have a five day hunt. But it is possible for you to be thinking about ways so specific to your hunts you have coming up to make that game plan adjust around when the pressure is going to be highest. If you've got a hunt and you know that there's 1200 people and it's near a major metropolitan area and you're just like, oh my goodness, like, I know this is going to be busy. I have no qualms with just saying, nope, not going out on the opening day. Matter of fact, I even did that last year on my general mule deer hunt. I saw that there was a storm coming later in the week and I know that the opening day is awfully busy, so I just said, sweet. I'm going to take the opening day and get caught up on some things and I'm going to start hunting on the night of the 16th. Well, that kind of gives you a little bit of an idea of where I was at. But regardless, I'm going to go hunting the night of the second day. And in doing that, I went out there and there was nobody else around. I started hunting on a Wednesday, hunted Thursday, hunted Friday, shot a buck Saturday morning. Then as I'm leaving, you know, I've used those first couple days to get a sense of where animals are at. And I know I've checked some places off the list. And at first light on Saturday morning, I shoot a buck. And as I'm packing out, I get in my truck and I'm driving out and there's people buzzing around all over. I'm like, of course it is. It's the only Saturday of the season. Of course there's going to be people buzzing around. Regardless. I hope that, you know, when you see other naysayers on the Internet or you run into them at the bar, that you also think about some of the ways that you can look into data and not just look at or listen to the irrational behavior of humans. For instance, every state out there puts out some sort of biological information and if they don't put it out publicly every single year, they collect that data. Every year. So, for instance, I've got this non resident tag in Montana, and I wanted to know how are herd health in some of these different units that I haven't heard anything about yet? So I call up the biologist, or I emailed them, actually, and I was like, hey, can you tell me, you know, what's the herd been doing the last five years and what's the buck ratio at? Can you give me a sense of how things have been trending for the last about five years? And in particular, this one area that I was looking into, I found out it's been steady, steady, steady for deer populations for a long time. And on top of that, the buck ratios, and they're not the single digits that Montanans always love to talk about. The buck ratios are in the low to mid-20s, just like a lot of the Colorado units are. And this isn't way out east either. It's not like some place that's known for there being a good deer herd. It just so happens that, you know, I took the time to contact the biologist and get some information, and I'm like, sweet. I'm gonna go check that out. That fits a. That fits the kind of the criteria I'm looking for. I know there's enough bucks in the herd, and I know the herd's big enough that I'm probably gonna have a chance at a mature buck in there. Then I went in and I scouted that country, and sure enough, first day up in there, we turned up three bucks, and two of them are potential shooters. I'm like, sweet, this is awesome. You know, like, I've. You do the legwork. You don't listen to the naysayers, and you go find some data that, you know, informs your decisions that is, you know, rooted in some observations, like some real observations. And then you go make a game plan based on that. Just another point on those, you know, biologist reports and the biologist data. I think it is important to notice when things are trending down. You have to adjust your expectations. If you're looking at a Nevada deer hunt right now and you're seeing that they're at an all time low for deer populations, yeah, I'd probably adjust my expectations. I'd expect to. Instead of seeing 15 bucks a day, like, man, I'd expect to see 10, 7. You know, do the math and then work out those figures to adjust what you might expect to see. And then as you think about your trophy expectation, how big of a critter should I be looking to get? Then you can also Adopt a different strategy. Oftentimes when I'm scouting in the summer, I oftentimes say, look, I'm going to go look for a 1 in 100 buck. And then once I find a 1 in 100 buck, I'll know what kind of quality is in the area. But that means I have to look over 100 different bucks in order to reach that criteria. I haven't looked at my recent scouting calendar, how many I've looked at this year, but. And I haven't hit the 100 deer mark. So I'm just going to keep looking, keep scouting as I can. And like, we'll probably keep collecting data for myself so that I can make an informed decision when it comes to actual hunting season. Now, keep in mind, I'm thinking about this both from a guiding and a personal hunting perspective. I have my Montana deer tag, I've got a Wyoming general tag. And then I'm also scouting in some limited quota areas. So I'm taking in all this information and I'm also comparing units to units and trying to get a sense of what's out there this year. Now, I know a lot of people can't do that. You can't, you know, if. Whether you've just got a busy schedule with life and kids and work, or you live a long, long ways away, that's where hunting the same area year after year after year really helps. I've seen more deer, more bucks in particular in my kind of home units than I normally have in as few days of hunting or scouting for them because I knew exactly where to go back and look this year. So Getting to my 1 in 100 number has been a lot easier than in previous years where I'm just trying to find new places. It's the same thing when I'm out scouting for these limited quota, hard to or hard to draw areas where I'm starting fresh, you know, and this is my first time guiding someone in this unit and I've spent a little bit of time scouting it in some areas. But like this whole last weekend I was in a totally new area and therefore I was just taking in information. I looked at about 20 bucks, a little less than 20 bucks, and I'm like, cool. This is, you know, this part of the unit. I know what's in here. I'm gonna go probably try to some do something else because I didn't see really what I was looking for here. This is a long tangent and a long way of saying, like it's really important to go truth information and Truth Data, for instance, that limited quota unit that I've been scouting, it is one that everyone will tell you there's giants in. And I'm out here, like, great. There probably are giants here. I'm almost. I'm almost certain of it. But it does still take work, and it still takes a lot of effort. And someone is going to go out there this year with that tag, and I'm probably going to run into them while I'm guiding these guys and say, there's no deer left. And I'm like, yeah, probably isn't. If you've only been out here for one Saturday, you know, like, it probably feels really freaking hard compared to what you'd expect. And oftentimes the winter kill is going to get blamed or predators are going to get blamed, but they weren't out there in August or July, like, looking around and trying to find the best bucks that they could. So therefore, they're going to have a result that is commensurate with their effort that they put into that hunt. All right, so this has been really long winded and more of a rant than probably you wanted to hear, but I feel better for it. I wanted to also touch on some things that you're going to run into as elk hunters this year, and that's that the rut hasn't happened yet. The rut hasn't happened yet. The wolves moved in and have, you know, made the elk shut up or whatever and. Or something to that effect. This is where I take that information, and I hear people say that, and I'm like, well, you just were not in the right part of the unit. I mean, if, like, let's say that does happen. Wolves move in, your elk shut up. You know that they're in there. Man, I'm not wasting any time. If I think that the elk that I was on, they were bugling two days ago. Yesterday they were shut up. This morning they were shut up. Dude, I'm popping smoke, and I'm going to the other side of the unit to try to find a bowl that is talking if it's really thick, if it's not really thick, and all my elk have shut up. Shut up. Then I'm going to get to a glassing knob and I'm going to rework my game plan so that I can make do with what I know, where the elk are and how I can hunt them differently. So this is where having either a, you have a. A game plan, you have a. You have a tool in a toolbox that you Love using. Let's say you love calling elk. Well, that's great. If the elk are quiet where you're at and you know they haven't talked or the rut hasn't happened, quote unquote. If they're not bugling where you're at, you have to have the type of game plans, creatures created beforehand to go to a new area and go find them. You got to go like, do the legwork to find the ones that are talking. If you're someone who has multiple tools in the toolbox and maybe a favorite area you like to hunt, then again you make an adjustment. You call an audible, go Omaha, Omaha. And go. Start glass in this country instead of relying on your bugle tube. Or maybe it's not a great glass bowl country. But then all of a sudden you just, just start spending your time sitting on wallows doing really like quiet cow calf call sequences. And you've done a good job in the summer of practicing those sequences. You've studied up on what that means and you commit to a new tool in the toolbox to run a game plan for silent elk. Again, I'm going really hard at this because it's going to happen to every single person. The only consistency within each western big game hunt is that things are not going to go how you hope they go. And I hope that that's the number one thing you take away from this. It's what you do with the unexpected circumstances that makes up the difference as to whether you have the type of hunt you're looking for or not. That means, you know, for the mass majority of people listening to this, that means whether or not you go home with an animal to put in your freezer or not. For a lot of people that means whether or not you find the next age class that you want or not, that's just like part of the game and that's what makes it so fun. If it was, if finding one animal of exactly what you want every single time was the standard, I don't think hunting would be nearly as interesting. And it wouldn't have the romanticism or the appeal that it does. The fact that people give up is part of what makes hunting really, especially western big game hunting, really, really appealing. And the fact that it challenges you mentally, physically, emotionally, it challenges your gear, it challenges your vehicles, like all of that stuff, that's part of what makes it so awesome. And I hope that as you're in the middle of something going south, you can smile and just be like, yeah, man, this is par for the course. This is just what I should have expected, because if everything goes smoothly, brother, I would expect that your. Your time for things going smoothly is ticking very, very quickly. That's not to say that if you go out and get a great animal on the opening day that you know you're destined for a bad karma to come your way. That's certainly not the case. Sometimes you get those hunts, but they are very much the minority of the time than they are the majority. Last thing I wanted to comment on was just people's motivation when they get into these hunts. One of the best tools for dealing with suffering is a little bit of laughter. If you go back and listen to any old mountain tough podcast where they kind of talk about managing grit, managing hard times, and managing physical challenges, it's always the people who can laugh and smile and take really difficult challenges and difficult times in stride that end up persevering in the end. So when you're like my brother and I and my buddy Jeff, and you've got water basically floating your sleeping pad in the bottom of your tent, and you look at that and you go, boy, this sucks. You just kind of laugh it off and go, man, that's just gonna make us tougher and it's gonna make us better for the next time. We're gonna know how to make better decisions on the next go round. And matter of fact, if we just keep hunting hard and we still find animals, it just makes for an even better story. Also, on the motivation front, I know that everyone out there is going to run into Burnout at some point in time. I talked about this with Cody Rich on a podcast a few months ago, and I asked him, like, what do you do when you run into burnout? He's someone, for instance, who runs into burnout on day 14 or 15. Though, for everybody who has different levels of experience doing this stuff, you're going to run into Burnout at different points in your hunt. Do not be ashamed if you run into Burnout on day three or four. Maybe you just get dealt a really crappy hand and you need to take a break and go reset, there's no harm in going to town, getting a good burger at the local bar, and grabbing a a motel room or grabbing an Airbnb for a night resetting so you can go back out and be 100% for the rest of your hunt. I really think that for those of you who do run into a wall this year, sometimes that's all you need to really reset your brain and reset your motivation. To go back out and hunt hard and hunt smart for the rest of the time that you're out there. So as you're thinking about your hunts this fall and if you have stories to share come the end of the the hunting season, hit me up. I would love to do some stories from the fall from people who listen to the podcast, and I know I'm going to do some from some of my Hunt west clients and guided clients. So be sure to reach out if you have a really good story of either when things go south or things go perfectly right, or anything in between that you want to share with people on the podcast. As we're looking forward to hunting season here, I've got my cow moose hunt coming up on September 1st, so I'm going to go do that for a handful of days, hopefully get a cow moose down. We've got some side quests built in. Hopefully, you know, a member of our moose hunting crew can make good on some elk and deer opportunities that are there, as well as probably some grouse hunting opportunities. And after that I've got a week to work and then we're going hard into the guiding and personal hunting schedule. So basically between now whenever you're hearing this and about September 12th, we we can still schedule in some Hunt west sessions and some hunt plans if you would like, help getting the most prepared as possible that you can for your upcoming big game hunt in the West. So if you're looking at a Colorado late season tag, get a hold of me now. If you're looking at Montana and you wanted to come out in muzzleloader season in December, get ahold of me now while we're still able to get on the computer and meet on Zoom and crash all these things out so you're prepared for the season. I also wanted to just give a shout out to everyone who listens to the podcast who has reached out and has scheduled a session and a hunt plan. I am rooting for all you guys. I'm so excited for the hunts. I was just texting some people who are out on hunts already that we built plans for and this is just my favorite time of the year. Man, I'm so pumped that people are getting out there and giving it their all and having a great time. And matter of fact, like, we've already got some great stories from the season so hopefully we'll we'll get a chance to share those at a later time on the podcast. Between now and the end of the season, I'm going to be queuing up some podcasts and probably pre recording a few so that while I'm out in the mountains you can still listen regularly. I'm gonna probably do a cadence of like every other podcast as a solo podcast to to help with the scheduling of all of that. So I apologize if you don't like the solo podcast, but looking at the download numbers, it seems like you guys don't mind when I get on these long rants and get to talking about different topics, just solo rounding. So if you want more guests or request guests, let me know and I'll get reached out to those guys and try to get them on the podcast. But if you have ideas for topics for more solo podcasts, let me know as well. I'm happy to deep dive into specifics around Western big game hunting and really get into the nitty gritty on these solo rounds. So looking forward to your feedback on that. All right guys, I've held you up long enough. Thank you again for listening to the Hunt west podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope if there's nothing else that you gathered from this, that whatever hardships, whatever challenges get thrown your way, you go with a no excuses attitude and you make it happen. Still, good luck out there and thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to the Hunt west podcast. If you like what you heard today, the best compliment you can give is to share the show with a friend. We will see you on the next episode and we hope one day to see you Hunt West. Sa.