The Pre-Rut Mule Deer Playbook | Solo Round

Hey, before we get into this week's episode, do you remember when buying an Idaho tag felt kind of like you're trying to win a concert ticket to see Taylor Swift? I mean, not like I've ever done that, but basically you'd wake up early, the system would crash, and you'd stare at a spinning queue for hours and hours on end just to not get a tag. Well, Idaho nuked that dumpster fire of a queue system and the game has completely changed with their over the counter draw that is happening this December. That's why on November 5th at 6pm Mountain time, I'm hosting an Idaho webinar with limited spots. It's 47 bucks a seat and in this webinar you'll learn what's changed, how to develop a good tag strategy, which parts of the state have been selling out fastest, and how you can pick good units that match your style, not just the ones that everyone says are good on the Internet. If you'd like to grab a spot, you can learn more information at the Show Notes or go to huntwestplanning.com and it should be right there at the header. All right, let's get into this week's show. Welcome to the Hunt West Podcast. Here's your host, Jaden Bales. What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Hunt West Podcast. This is your host, Jaden Bales and I'm rolling solo again today. I was going to try to get somebody else on to chat about the playbook for Pre Rut mule deer hunting, but turns out everyone else is out hunting just like I'm going to be when you're listening to this podcast. So you're going to be stuck with me rolling solo again this week. Again, it's one of those things where I love hearing your feedback and I hope that you think about these podcasts more as like an educational one. Obviously the stories are going to be super fun after season and we're going to get some folks on who, you know, know, are really good at what they do or that have had some awesome experiences to share with you. But we're mid season right now so we got to roll with what we've got and I want to keep cranking out stuff that is helpful for this time of year and is going to help you on your hunts. Both plan them better and enjoy your hunts more and set expectations for the hunts that are coming up. Today is all about the Pre Rut Mule Deer Playbook. If you want the pre the Post Rut Elk Playbook basically Like this same time of year. But the elk version, I'm doing that in the Hunt West Digest. And the Hunt West Digest, if you didn't already know, is a Sunday email that I send out every Sunday morning and it gets sent directly to your inbox basically covering a lot of the same tactics, tips, thoughts and just what we're seeing on the ground week in, week out and really is just like a little brain teaser for you to keep your mind educated and like keep your brain in the game as far as planning these hunts and, and just being a better all around western hunter. So go check that out if you haven't already. So like I said, today is all about pre rut mule deer hunting. Pre rut in my mind is basically anything from that. Well, by definition it's going to be before the buck start breeding the does. But in particular, you know, you kind of have your summer patterns that occur for most archery seasons mid September and then from mid September to like mid October. Bucks are just, they're still in their bachelor groups and they're basically just holed up in some hidey hole where they're really hard to get to. But now we're entering this phase where bucks are going to start moving, they're migrating if they're in a migratory herd or they're starting to kind of flirt with the idea of sniffing around does and you're going to see a little bit of, of breeding activity. You're going to see a little bit of stuff seeking activity as the whitetail guys call it, where they're just kind of out on walkabouts checking dough groups and seeing if things are in in heat or getting close to it. So we're going to be focusing on that time frame depending on the state you're in depends on, you know, the tag. The tag you have will, you know, the, the dates around this are going to be kind of fluid. However, I've had the good fortune opportunity to hunt a variety of types of these tags in for had the chance to guide the last handful of seasons in. There are only five tags given out and this is in Wyoming and it is like a premium hunt. Right. Like we're talking, we're looking for gov tag type bucks, commissioners tag type bucks. We're this is like the top of the top of the heap for western mule deer hunting experiences. Like I said, I've had the chance to hunt that a couple years in a row guiding it. And that's a whole, you know, subset of of experiences of what you're looking for. But Then you also have like some of these general tag hunts that I've done in the past where you're hunting late October into early November. And in Wyoming in particular where I've done those hunts, there's a lot of folks out and about. You see people, but you're also seeing deer all day long. And there's some different strategies and, and in particular that's a big mountain type hunt. There's some different strategies that proved to be successful for us doing that. I've helped a bunch of friends at different various times on that late season hunt before I started guiding. And I think that there's some common threads between that general style hunt which for non residents takes like one point or no points to draw. There's some common threads between that and like this migration hunt that I've guided which takes max points and then you only are you're all fighting for one tag if you're a non resident. And even then it's just like, you know, a super, super limited premium experience. And also I've had the opportunity to go down to Colorado now Colorado, they kind of specialize in these kinds of hunts, Colorado and Montana especially. So as you're listening to this or the day that this comes out, the Montana general rifle deer season opens up and so does Colorado second season, Colorado second season and even Colorado third season for the most part are still in that mostly pre rut behavior. You can see some running activity in that third season especially. But second season is well known for it's a migration hunt and it's a prereq mostly hunt. The other thing that's going on right now is Utah, their late rifle general tags again they fall right in this end of the season and so do some units in Idaho. So what we're talking about here is some common threads that you can find in most of these western states. And I think most people assume, you know, once you get into this late October, like mule deer hunting is supposed to be easier and it's just like simply not necessarily the case, especially for the easier to draw tags. And when I say easier to draw, dude, I'm talking sub 10 points. Even then know you're talking about like this hunt when we're hunting that there are a bunch of people running around looking for deer and like trying to find the one that are mixed in with you. And it's like everyone's con conglomerated around like one part of the unit where the majority of the action is happening and it's busy. There's cow elk hunters out There, there's bull elk hunters out there. There's like it's, it's a pressured hunt, even though the deer themselves like aren't necessarily getting more bullets flung at all day long. But the majority of all of these hunts have one thing in common. Even though it's a migration hunt, it's weather dependent. And even though it's at the end of October, early November, you don't see running activity every single day. And even though those two things will make or break or like really turn on or make the hunt excellent, they get. The lack of those things can really make it tough as well. So let's talk a little bit about what's happening at this time of the year for the bucks and their behavioral changes, their testosterone spiking, their necks are swollen, they're starting to, you know, rub on trees, they're starting to cover country, checking doe groups and they're basically breaking up from their bachelor groups of bucks as they do that. You know, like the colder weather is going to help get them up on their feet. They're going to be running, checking doe groups more often. They're going to be migrating more often. When it's cold and like when it starts snowing, things are on their feet. They're like. It's one of the, the best parts about this time of year when you do get a good snowstorm is stuff starts moving, especially coming off the doldrums of mid October. Stuff will actually like and stuff mule deer, bucks in particular will get to moving. There's some units though where basically like deer will migrate on a, on a timeframe, like a, basically a day length of day. And in those units, like I know there's some, some of those in Idaho, there's some of those in Oregon, there's some in, in Nevada where they just start migrating with, with or without the snow, they'll be migrating. But if you don't have the weather and it's still hot out, you will basically find that they're migrating at night. And you can like there's a great story on the rock cast where this fellow with an Idaho like late season tag would drag the road, a dirt road and come back in the morning and see what's crossed. And he wasn't necessarily seeing deer up on their feet during the day, but he could see their tracks coming across the road and he's like, God, they're moving, but they're moving at night and you'll see that happening right now. So like whether or not you think that the deer are Migrating they are. What happens is oftentimes the weather is going to help determine whether they're moving in daylight or whether they're moving much at visible hours when you can actually see them behind your spot and scope or binos. The other thing that's really important is I think a lot of people hope or hear or, you know, might see a buck, like sniff and doze and think that, oh, the rut's going like, I got to check all the doe groups. The vast majority bucks, again, they're not, especially the big mature bucks. They're not going to be with each doe group. That said, you know, you're listening to this, I think it's the 25th when this thing comes out. Last week, one of the guides that one of the outfitters that I work for, he saw a buck with does that was a mature buck, like, so you're going to get outliers at this time of year, but you shouldn't develop your whole plan based on outliers. That's the biggest thing I think people end up doing is they'll be like, well, I'm going to check dough groups because it's easier and I just see more deer. And maybe, just maybe there's going to be a buck running around him. That's not the right mentality for this time frame. I was just talking to a guy, he's got a premium tag in Montana, and we were talking about their rifle opener, which is today, the day that this is coming out. And he was like, man, I think I should go high. And I'm like, well, they also aren't going to be in their summer patterns, especially in like a classic mountain unit. This deer have not just bumped out of the alpine, but they're like bumped down a little bit further than that too. Especially right now. We've had plenty of mountain snow storms to get things moved off the top of the country. So for the most part, when you're talking about a top to bottom mountain range, say you have 4,000 vertical from where your unit starts at the bottom to the top of the nearest peak. 4000 vertical, you're going to be dealing with the lower half of that. That doesn't mean, like the whole lower half of that is going to be sagebrush and transition country. You're going to probably have some, some mid zones that are really thick and there's going to be deer holed up there, especially in like a Colorado. But you will find that the deer are not no longer at the top either. So this can make this whole Time frame this whole time of year, A really interesting mishmash of approaches that you can take. So when we're talking about, you know, what you should be doing, I first want to lead off with some of my experiences with hunt, because I think this is the best example of what to expect when you've got deer. Just doing deer stuff now. And I talked about how, you know, we're managing other hunters and people looking and helping other hunters and cow elk hunters and bull elk hunters and stuff. They're still out there on that hunt. We one of the things that's really. It's the best case scenario for when deer are just doing deer stuff. You could find this happening if you get yourself way in the back country. Let's just say that there's a big canyon that you can hike into and go set up camp, and there's no other hunters around. You could find this kind of activity back there. But when we are guiding this hunt, essentially the majority of our plan is built around at first light and last light every day, we're going to be looking at the main migration corridor, and there's going to be one person posted up, not moving a dang inch, watching the migration corridor. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't deer that slip by the migration corridor that you don't ever see. But if I was someone who knew, you know, maybe I looked at some game and fish data, maybe I just had talked to people who've hunted the unit before. Maybe I've hunted it enough to know where the migration paths are. I would be just sitting, just not hiking around, not trying to dig up stuff in the morning and evening, I would just be sitting on a migration path watching new deer coming in and out. And obviously, if you're in a place that has high deer numbers, like this specialty hunt, it's going to be a lot easier on your brain to be sitting there watching doe groups and little bucks and stuff come through. But the number one thing that I noticed on this hunt is even when we just get cold weather and just a skiff of snow, the migration really, really slows down. Middle of the day, you're just sitting there. You're like, holy crap. Like, I haven't seen a deer for a while. And you're like, this is supposed to be some premium hunt. I haven't seen a deer in a while. And then, like, sometime around midday, just one pops up. You're like, holy crap, where'd that thing come from? And it's such a good example. Like, deer are the word is crepuscular. They move at the mornings and they move in the evenings. However, when they get to their real migration mode, especially some of these bucks that are off by themselves, they don't necessarily have to move with the big groups. The bucks by themselves can just come through and just kind of like basically they're going from a betting spot to a betting spot, but it's along the migration path. So again, just wanted to reiterate. Even in the most premium units of hunting a migration, we pick a spot on the migration route, sit down and just watch deer move by morning and evening. And if things are really slow, we just sit there during the day as well. The reason why we sit there on that migration path during the middle of the day, especially if it's just not great weather, it's not conducive to deer being up on their feet and other parts of the unit is essentially what you're hoping for is a buck to get up re bed and as they re bed, they're moving along the migration path to move down the migration path to re bed again and you're going to catch them middle of the day. I picked up, the first year that I guided that unit, I picked up like a 30 inch buck and he just was just, was outside what, or just inside, you know, basically what we were looking for out of that hunt. Some of you may have seen photos of, of this deer that I'm referencing Instagram or something. He was a, he was a beautiful buck, but he came through like mid afternoon and I was just like, holy crap. I've been sitting on this spot all dang long all day long. And he just popped up all of a sudden. And that's just such a good example of what you can expect when you're on a, a true migration hunt and deer just doing their thing. You're not going to see them all day long. But if you're on the migration path and you know exactly where you need to be, they will come through and you know, we'll catch you off guard middle of the day. You just certainly cannot miss morning and evening either. So when it comes to, you know, some of the more heavily hunted units, I think one of the things that people oftentimes overlook is how does hunting pressure affect these deer? And again, you know, morning and evening are your sweet spots. But essentially what you're going to be doing is you're going to be still looking at some of the more rugged terrain. The big bucks, you were still going to be looking at safety and they're still going to be in some of the, some of the steeper country, some of the rocker your country, and they're not going to be down with the dough groups that are down in like the sagebrush flats all day long. What you would find, I think most of the time if you could just have night vision and be watching what's happening is essentially this time of year, a buckle bed maybe a thousand feet up, you know, of elevation from a doe group and be sitting in a spot where they're looking down on these deer. This is actually how I killed my Nevada buck. In 2021. A big snowstorm had come through, and it was, I think the 24th or 25th of October. So basically, like right now when you're listening to this and what had happened was the snowstorm got deer on their feet. And what we were glassing for, we looked at this big basin and we saw these little bucks and they're kind of sparring, like doing their thing. And we looked and there was a whole bunch of does down to the bottom. And I was like, you know, there's got to be, there's got to be a mature buck in here somewhere. And this was again, this is actually another really premium unit that I had a tag for. And we're looking, and we're looking. We're like, where the hell is a big buck? There's got to be a big buck somewhere. And at 10am we finally caught him. He was he re bedded and it was colder than crap. There's like 8 inches of fresh snow. And this mature buck had gotten up and he was sitting 800ft above those does, just watching them. And the little bucks are down there jerking around like, not doing anything of importance as far as the rut was concerned. But they were next to the doe groups and the mature buck was off by himself. That's the kind of thing that you're going to be looking for. I just pulled this up here just to provide folks with a frame of reference of some elevations. And in that particular hunt, we're looking at does that are at 7,700ft. They're just kind of like in this little basin. And then that buck, man, he was up there at like, I GUESS it was 600ft above. He was basically at, oh, come on, math, 8,300ft. So again, we're glassing one basin and you can see these elevation gradients from one glassing knob. That's the other thing is, like, people will ask, well, what elevation will the deer be at? And you're like, well, pick a glassing knob where you can see multiple elevation bands, because that's going to help. Help you basically be able to find out where the dose are at and then look above them or look behind them or look, you know, in the vicinity, but not right in that same bubble with them to find mature bucks. When we've hunted the general season, like the heavily hunted stuff in. In Wyoming during this time frame, again, one of the most important strategies that we've done is find the. Find the migration route. And once we found it, we posted up and we built the fire and just sat there all day long. And I think a lot of folks would be like, but you're not covering ground. I'm like, no, no. We're hiking in the dark, get to the glassing knob, and we sit there and glass and glass and glass. And like those deer. You know, there's a spot that a friend of ours turned us on to where basically you. You sit on this knob and you'll watch deer come by all day long. And it's. It's pretty sweet. But what you're watching come by all day long are forking horns and does. Fork and horns and does. Fork and horns and does. And then you'll see like 30 or 40 of those things go by. They're like on their way. And then what you see is a buck pops up by themselves. Like a more mature buck will pop up by themselves. And in this particular spot, there's a lot of hunter pressure. Basically, we're sitting in this basin watching. It's kind of like a little island that watches the migration route in front of us. And on that little island, you almost always will glass up. One dude on the ridge to your right and one dude on your ridge to the left. And what they're doing most of the time is the dudes are just glassing the ridges that they're standing on, or they're walking up and down them and they'll miss deer because they're. The dudes are up on their feet at the same time. The deer are. And the dudes aren't glassing very well. The dudes are just like. And I say this because I'm calling out, I've only seen dudes doing this. So maybe there's some gals out there who are hiking past deer too. But basically we'll sit there and watch deer walk past people who are sitting on the glassing knob. There's this one knob in particular that they love to sit on. And I think it's probably effective. Like guys have probably killed deer off of it. But there's a glassing knob that they sit on that they're looking on the same ridge as them, hoping that they come across. And oftentimes what we'll see is bucks come across the ridge in front of them, 700 yards down the way. So the guys who are just sitting on what they think is a migration path, it's more like a spider web. So you have to sit back from it to catch the deer moving across the spider web of a migration path. If you're sitting right on what you think is the trail, I think you're gonna, you're gonna be wrong more times than you're right. Especially when you've got hunter pressure and you've got, you know, especially if it's warmer weather, etc. Deer are just going to be spread out and just kind of filtering almost like liquid across this hillside. They're not just going to be in a straight line every single time. You will see doe groups doing that and most oftentimes dough groups. I'll have like a little buck with them or whatever. But especially this time of year, if it's warm weather like it kind of is right now, you're just going to see them kind of like flowing across this big, you know, this big open slope. Again, I think this is maybe helpful. I'm going to provide some people with some, some elevation references here. I told you the, the Nevada deer were basically from 7,500 to 8,300. And in this spot that I'm talking about in Wyoming, we were hunting them from. Well, we saw deer at the bottom which was 6400 and we, we're, we're checking out deer that were as high as 8,400. So we've got a 2,000 foot elevation band. And again they just will filter through that 2000 foot elevation band. And you have to be glassing top to bottom in order to catch them. Catch em wherever they're coming across. I think one of the important things is to remember when you're hunting these late season deer hunts. There are probably, you know, especially in the easier to draw units. There's probably gonna be a lot of dudes out there walking around or driving around, et cetera. But oftentimes deer go missed when people aren't stopping to glass them. They're just hard to pick up unless they. That you catch them at the right moment when they've stepped out from behind, you know, a big sage brush or stepped out from, you know some thick pine trees, et cetera. So if you're on a migration path, please promise me you will sit there and watch it all day long. Because that is especially when it's warm weather. You're going to find deer moving through there, but you're going to have a hard time picking them up if you're walking around covering miles. What's up everybody? Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a brief story to tell you. Back in 2019, I met Brad Brooks of Argali when I was on a boot testing project with him for a different company. It was then I got to learn that Brad's attention to detail creates some of the best backcountry products there is. I also just freaking like the guy. So I ended up running a bunch of his gear for the next handful of years. Then this summer when he came out with the clothing project, I jumped all over my chance to wear it. A rat on freaking cheese. So now I'm telling you about this project because I've had the chance to spend all fall in his Vesper pants, Torx pants and Guide air fleece. I especially like the Vesper pants. They're my favorite pant that I've ever worn. So far, this stuff is just fine tuned for exactly what backcountry hunters in the west need. So if you want more information, be sure to sign up for his email list at the show notes or argali outdoors.com that way you'll get early access to behind the scenes updates, insights from testers in the field like me, and you'll find out when you can actually get your hands on some of this gear later this winter. All right, that's all I have for you today. Let's get back to the show. You're listening to the Hunt west podcast. So another example that I think is really pertinent is going to be talking about kind of this migration into pre rut activity that you end up seeing when it comes to like Colorado. And I'm going to pick on Colorado a little bit because oftentimes the the winner range, it gets hit so hard during second and third season that the winter range itself is just not a very fun hunt. I'm not going to tell you there's not bucks there, but it's just like not enjoyable. And so when I had the tag I took an approach of I'm going to go higher than the winter range and basically I went up to the next elevation band to go into some lower deer densities but also hopefully find a more mature Buck. The idea here is, and it's a prevailing thought that the mature bucks don't come down or like the big bucks don't come down until later. You know, it's like the prevailing thought in Colorado that, you know, fourth season is the best season because the big bucks really don't come out of the woodwork until then. I don't know if that's totally true. I think that you're probably just going to see like big bucks in particular have been maybe picked out of the population that has hit the the winner range early. So maybe in practice it turns out that way. But I don't necessarily think there's inherently something different about the deer that stay high versus the deer that go low. What it is, is like they just learn this behavior from the generations before them and then the behavior that has let them live has been such that if you stay high, you live longer. So I don't think that there's a whole lot of science to it. It just is more like if you're going high to these populations that aren't getting hammered as ear or as often, then you might increase your chances at finding an older age class animal. So in Colorado, I started off actually hitting some kind of like mid elevation stuff. And what I found was I got up to the glassing knob, I hiked in about an hour, hour and a half in the dark, climbed 1200ft up in there, and I sat down and was looking down into these draws, and as it's getting light, there were three groups of hunters. There was one solo guy, a group of two dudes, and then a dude and maybe his wife or daughter hiking up with headlamps on, coming up towards me. And I was just like, oh, buddy, this is going to be a show. Funny enough, they were elk hunting and I watched a guy shoot an elk right out from underneath me. I didn't have an elk tag in my pocket, but after that I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to the higher stuff. Even though it's probably lower deer densities. I'm gonna go do something where there's not a bunch of yahoos running around. So I went to the end of the road and it was a snowy year that year, early, early November, I went to the end of the road and I started hiking. I'm looking at the map while I'm talking about this. I started hiking at 8,000ft and I hiked up to 9,000ft. So again, maybe this, this is that elevation band higher than what we've just been looking at for the standard, you know, time frame of hunting deer this time of year. But I found out there weren't very many people who are wanting to walk through knee deep snow to get up into there. And I found about three groups of deer that were living up in there. And each of these three groups of deer that I found did not have a mature buck with them. They had like fork and horns or like two by threes, you know, like little bucks with them. At this point in the year, I had, I had filled some tags already. So I was like just trying to be picky, looking for a big mature buck that was in Colorado. And essentially I just was like, I'd cut a track. Let me, let me also set the stage a little further. There was fresh snow. I was at 8,000 to 9,000ft and I was in thick aspens, Some of these thick aspen stands you could glass into. And I ended up doing some long range glassing middle of the day. But I thought to myself, well, it's thick enough aspens and there's fresh snow, so I'm going to track. And what I did in that tracking was basically I'd moved through these parks and these aspens and as I'm like moving through, I basically would find tracks and then start running them out. And when you found a group of deer, oftentimes in a fresh snow you can pick out a buck track, but like, you can't really keep track of the buck track because there's all these others around. And I vividly remember I was tracking these deer and they went up through this park and they'd done this at night because it was just barely cracking light When I found these tracks. They had gone up the hill and I was following them. The wind's coming down in the morning and I'm following these deer tracks and I get up to this like bench and then I'm actually looking at it on. On X right now. This is making me excited. I get up to this bench and the deer tracks just kind of start spreading out, like getting kind of crazy. And I'm like, dude, they're. They're not going to go much further here. Like before, it was kind of like there was a group of deer moving in a direction and now they're just like spreading out. I'm like, they're in here somewhere. So I slowed my pace down and I'm like creeping through, creeping through, creeping through. And I pick up a doe and I'm like, okay, cool, where's the bucks? And I'm looking there's a fork and horn. Like, yeah, that's not what I want. So I keep looking a little further. I bump them, knowing that, you know, there wasn't any deer in the direction I was bumping them. And I walked a little bit further and there was another deer. And I was like, no, that's like a little like a fork by spike. It's not the buck I want. And I'm looking like, gosh, there's no big buck in here. I had fallen in the trap that once you hit early November, that there's just going to be big bucks with every doe group. And that's just not the case either. But I kept looking. I kept looking and I get past, like, kind of the herd and I go, man, like, I'm surprised there wasn't a buck in here. But I keep walking a little further and I cut a track and it's like a lone buck track. And I'm like, no freaking way. There is a good. There's a buck in here that's not with this group of deer. And I'm following, I'm following, I'm following. And then I like peek around this aspen and I catch like an ear flicker or something. I throw my binos up and I peer around this aspen tree and there's this like 22, 24 inch. I don't remember 22 inch. Let's just say I don't know how wide his ears are. About as wide as his ears. Colorado three point sitting there laying there looking at me. And he was just such clearly like the next age class above what the other bucks were that were with the doe groups, but. But still wasn't quite what I was looking for. And that was day two of my hunt. So I was like, man, I stood there at like 70 yards. This buck's bedded. He's looking at me, I'm staring at him. We just got the old Texas stare down and I go, nah. And I take my phone out and take a picture. I didn't end up killing deer on that. On that hunt, but there was some other opportunities at some similar age class bucks on that hunt that I kept running into. And what I found out was basically again, the majority of the older age class bucks, we're talking three, four, and up, were just like hanging near ish the doe groups, but they weren't with the doe groups. So it's one of those things. When I found a doe group from then on, it was important to check it. And oftentimes the bucks wouldn't be there. With them. Like the more mature bucks wouldn't be there with them after an hour of daylight and they wouldn't show back up until, you know, right before dark later on in that hunt. This is one of my biggest regrets as far as like hunt planning is concerned. And again, you know, you're just kind of learning as you go, right? But I left that dirt, I left that group of deer and I went to a glassing knob and it was middle of the day and I was like, well, I'm not going to do anything with my on my feet middle of the day. Let's just glass into all of these big aspen stands that are across the canyon from me. So I get up on this glassing knob and I can see a mile and further. I mean, you can see up to like three miles. But really that one to two mile range is where the hillsides are that I'm like looking at and picking apart and I'm glassing and I pick up another doe group and I don't find a buck in there. I wish, like, this is my regret. I wish that I was stuck around and kept hunting up in that country. I never did because I saw that, that group across the canyon from me and there wasn't a big buck in there. I didn't go over there to look around. But knowing what I know now, I'd have bailed off that and I would have started digging around up in that same pocket because I'm sure there was probably again another mature buck that wasn't exactly with those does, but there was probably one nearby that was going to come check them at last light or be there at first light. And what I ended up doing was opting to go to all of the hunter pressure where there was a bunch of deer and go kind of duke it out with those guys. The important thing was even though, like, I left this really secluded, like, lower deer density, like, again, there was three doe groups in, in a day and a half of hunting up there that I found. You know, I left this kind of like lower deer density for the higher deer density where you're seeing deer all day long. There was, there's people all over it. However, the folks who are hunting it, we're just walking around. So what you'd see oftentimes is like, guys are just like cruising these ridge tops and underneath them in the oak brush like 2, 3, 400 yards, there's a, there's a buck running around a doe and essentially like the guy who's standing on the same ridge as them can't see the deer, that it's on the same hillside as them. When you've got thick aspens or oak brush or sagebrush or, or pine trees, whatever the case is, if you got thick cover, you can't see what's underneath you. And therefore it's basically making it unhuntable. Un. Something is just right up in your grill and you got to make a quick like sub hundred yard shot. So again, that was a great lesson in the fact that, you know, I think a lot of times this, this time of year people will start looking at doe groups and assuming that there's bucks there and people will just walk and cover country, cover country, cover country. And I don't think that they do it with a lot of intentionality. The most important thing is if you are walking, I hope that you're looking for tracks in the snow or maybe you've got a fresh rain and you got some mud that you're looking for track in just to kind of give you a, a direction, a place to be glassing, a place to be still hunting. Because if you're just pounding country, it is very tough in mo the most of the west to actually just like consistently be turning up deer. And then you end up just wearing yourself out, wearing yourself out physically and mentally. And it's just not near as effective of a hunting as it is when you are actually doing things with intentionality. The other piece of that hunt that I really just. It was kind of funny. I. I ended up leaving. I think I had a day and a half left and I left early. It was again, maybe another regret that. I wish I would have stuck that one out because it was starting to pick up. But one of the guys that I had met on that hunt, he did shoot a really nice buck in the middle of all the people. There was like, I've got a photo and there's like 14 trucks at the trailhead. And he shot a dandy of a mule deer like a five and a half year old deer. Didn't score super great because he had these crabby fronts. But he was able to dig out a mature buck in there just because he stuck around and was glassing well. And he just like figured out how to not let the hunter pressure bother him. If you're in one of these places where your hunter pressure is just so high that you're like frustrated by it, take a deep breath, find yourself a good glass and knob, build a glassing fire and just grind it out behind the glass. Don't be doing what all the other hunters are doing where you're driving roads and you're freaking walking ridge lines and you're blowing stuff out that you don't even know is there just ooze fra. As they say in anger management, sit down and pick things apart with your glass. So going into this week's hunt, the one I'm on, the one that I'm, I'm out probably behind some binoculars. While you're listening to this podcast, if you listen to it with any sort of urgency following its, its, you know, release, we have a unit that is essentially, it's a high point unit, but it's not super low tag numbers. And this unit is essentially all a low country unit. So we're not talking about giant migrations, right? Like, we're not talking about migrations in a way that they're following this canyon wall or like, you know, flowing like liquid across the canyon wall that's 2,3000ft. There are some terrain features out in this unit that I'm guiding right now which would provide a natural funnel for deer to move along. And I'm going to be looking at those. But the most important thing is, you know, let's just say you're hunting a non migratory herd that you've scouted or you know, either it's just all low enough elevation that they don't migrate a whole lot or if they do migrate, they don't migrate very far. And essentially what I did this summer is I was looking for bucks, right? I got, and we found a few bucks and the other guides and outfitters have been out there, they found some bucks too, earlier in the season. So we know where bucks in bachelor groups have been. We're talking about like the 25th of October. So we're going to be out there looking for the bucks first. If we can find bucks that haven't gone to mess with those and migrate yet, we're going to just start there. If there aren't bucks where we expect them to have been like AKA if we go to these spots where we glassed up bucks earlier in the season or in the summer scouting, if we go to those spots and there's no bucks there, it's like sweet, let's go look at the country right above the does. So while I was doing my, my scouting in this unit, I knew that we were going to be hunting this in late October. So as much as I was looking for bucks to kill, we were, I was marking down where I was seeing the highest doe numbers. It's not that I'M going to go look and check every doe pocket, which, you know, whenever you see a deer, you do check all the. The deer around it. And not seeking out the does specifically, though what I'm talking about is cool. I've got this place logged in my brain that does are hanging out. And now I'm going to look at the onx maps, look at, you know, the terrain in a way that basically allows me to work it backwards and say, sweet. Where are bucks going to stage near them? You know, there's this one pocket in particular where I, I probably saw 20, 30 bucks or sorry, 20, 20 or 30 does in one evening in glassing, in this one little, this one little pocket, let's just call it a three mile square area. And I was like, holy crap, there's a ton of does in here. Did not find a buck in there. While I put that in back, my brain and I'm like, okay, cool. This is pretty mellow, sage, brushy terrain. Like there's some little pockets of buck brush. Like it's is. This is good to know. Like, this is just mellower. But like two miles away on either side of this pocket of sagebrush are some steep, cliffy, like more gnarly terrain that kind of just like would be what I would call staging areas. Right above or near the does and what they could do, these bucks that if they're wanting to check the does and see if anything is in heat, they could leave this steeper country at night and then go check does and literally make like a 2, 3 mile loop and then come back and bed in this deeper stuff. I'm really excited. Like, if the bucks are not in the places where we've, we've scouted them and they've been in the earlier parts of the season, I'm really excited to go into these zones where there's going to be steeper, rockier, you know, more rugged habitat for these bucks to hole up in and basically stage right before they go check does either at night or maybe early in the morning or late in the evening, lastly. So, okay, step one is we're talking about checking the buck areas, the buck bachelor group areas, just to see if there's any lingering around that haven't, you know, started doing their, their pre ret staging yet. Then we're gonna go check some of the does that aren't too far from there to see if they're staging near the does and then like plan C basically. And now let me also back this up and say within each of these like strategies, there's little, there's subsets of plans. Right? Like, we know that there's. There were bucks in these three kind of zones that we can glass, like these three glassing areas. And if they're not in those three glassing areas, then we're going to check down. It's almost like you're, you're checking down to a new receiver in, in the NFL, but you're going to check down to the does and look at the terrain that suits bucks near the does. And if they're not there, then in my back pocket I have this idea that there is a little bit of a migration that catches a corner of the unit and the general units. This is a limited quota one we're hunting, but the general units have been going on around it. And we're going to be looking at where the general unit pressure and migration corridors may have pushed deer into this area, may have pushed deer that we didn't scout into places that we can now hunt. I'm really excited to have that as a backup option as well. There's, there's basically two corners, two pieces of, of elevation that are going to basically create a natural filter into the unit. And I think those can be really effective for us. Essentially, those, you know, elevations that we're looking at, I keep mentioning this is a lower elevation unit that is not the traditional mountain that we started off the podcast talking about, but we're going to be talking about the bottom of the unit's 5000ft and the top of the unit is 7500ft. So again, this is still not like there's 2300 vertical feet of elevation change. And we're going to try to cover as much of that from one glassing knob as we can. For the most part, you can, you can almost everywhere on this unit. You can look at a thousand foot of elevation terrain. Maybe that means you're sitting at 6,500 and can see down to 6 and up to 7. Maybe you're sitting at 7,000 and you can see down to 6,000. Again, it's not necessarily about how you, you find the glassing knob, it's just that you find a good one that allows you to see the type of terrain you're looking for. As we're starting off this hunt, just looking at the, the weather forecast, and again, it's kind of hard. I'm recording this before I leave, obviously, but as I'm looking at this weather forecast, it looks like the season this, this hunt that we're doing this Guided hunt is going to start off kind of warm. We're talking about like, you know, daytime highs in the upper 50s, low 60s. That's going to be pretty tough hunting. It's going to be breezy. There's not going to be a lot of deer on their feet. And so essentially the mornings and evenings are going to be make or break. Like you gotta freaking grind it out mornings and evenings. And then if you find some. Some sorts of terrain that allow you to glass in the middle of the day, whether it's a burn or like in this unit, we've got some rocky zones where bucks will like to bed in the rocks and you can pick out tines middle of the day. That'll keep us kind of busy for the middle of the day. And then once we get some, some weather moving through, I will probably be covering a lot more country. It looks like we're getting some snow showers with a low around 25 on Monday. That's going to be sweet. And if we don't shoot a deer on Tuesday, I would be surprised. I say that. I'm not trying to call that shot, actually. That's a. That's a strong. That's a strong guess. But it. Tuesday should be a dang good day. We're going to have snow showers on. On. We're gonna have rain and snow Sunday, snow on Monday and then Tuesday. Supposed to clear up and be cold 25 in the morning. So I love that kind of conditions for a late October, early November type hunt. That's gonna, that's gonna get deer on their feet. They're gonna be moving, either migrating or looking for does or looking to, you know, check or move closer to does. And that, that can be really dang good hunting. Okay. So if you can't tell already, I love this time of year. I think this is some of the most enjoyable deer hunting because you're working with bucks that are basically just transitioning out of their hidey holes and they're just popping up. And right about now is when anything can happen. And I love that part. It's just like a mystery as to what you can find this time of year. And that keeps everything always exciting. Like we haven't found a giant deer in scouting in this, this preseason or earlier in the season when the gu were out there, we never did see a giant. But when you start getting into this like pre rut migration, like cold weather type hunting, anything can happen that makes me really excited. And that goes for Montana, that goes for Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and especially, you know, Wyoming, where there's not a ton of late October hunting. Anything can come out of the woodwork this time of year. So do your best to stick behind the glass. Don't cover too much country on your feet. And if you're moving between places, you know, try to do it with intention. Maybe you're going straight to another glassing knob, or maybe you're going to work this ridgeline, see if you can cut tracks and then in the snow and then dive into those tracks and track something out. But for the love of God, do not just like walk around like Elmer Fudd out in the woods and expect that you're just going to stumble into something just with, you know, maybe that worked a little bit in the 80s. Maybe that works really good in a unit that has a high, high deer numbers where you're going to bump into something. But especially if you're trying to do things intentionally like target big mature bucks, you just got to be thinking things differently and doing things with intention. So I hope that you take that away as the number one lesson of this week's podcast when you're out there hunting in the mule deer pre rut playbook. All right everybody, I appreciate you listening in. If you've got hunts coming up, I'm rooting for you. Thanks again 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. Oh shoot, you're still here. Well, while I got you, here's how Hunt west services work. If you want to use your points or random applications wisely, you can hire me for a tag application strategy session. If you want to learn how to escout and create a kick ass hunt plan, bring me on for a Hunt west session. If you want your hunt planning done for you but can't afford a guided hunt, let's create a week long hunt plan together using the most recent intel and fully fleshed out battle plan I can create with you. This includes hunt itineraries, onyx pins and gear lists. You can find more information about all these services@huntwestplanning.com okay, carry on with your yard work or laundry or whatever you're doing to pass the time. I'll be here waiting when you're ready to book.