Folks,
I opened a thread earlier asking for some hunting advice in CO 2nd season GMU 33 for buck hunting. To show my gratefulness I thought I'd report back my experience and some lessons for beginners like myself.
Neither my friend nor I got a buck. This was only his first hunt, and my second year, but of course we had high hopes. In fact, we never even saw a buck on public land. In five days of hunting, we only saw a small forky on a golf course (we promptly headed to the adjacent BLM in the hope that he'd come our way, but no luck). This unit gives out 500 buck tags, and it is also an OTC bull unit, so as you can imagine it was very crowded. Everywhere we hunted, we generally saw multiple other hunters. So it was a challenging hunt - for us, anyway.
I'm still trying to process the lessons from this one. I go back and forth between opposing ideas. On the one hand, I would sometimes feel that we needed to go further and further back from the roads, away from hunting pressure. On the other hand, we only ever saw deer at lower elevations, at river bottoms, mostly on private, so I also often felt that the smartest way was to glass draws closer to towns, leading out to good private land ag. This strategy did give us our only decent encounter with deer within shooting distance - but it turned out to be a group of does. Perhaps bucks are less likely to keep this close to people once the hunting pressure is on? Or they are more dispersed in general? In any case, I felt like I was constantly changing my mind about this, and that bit of switching took away from our hunting time a bit.
We would often head out to an area, hike and glass for a few hours, and then head back to the truck to try out another area. Once again, my mind would go back and forth between opposing ideas: "we should slow down and glass another hour or two - maybe something will turn up" vs "we've covered this area and found nothing - let's move somewhere else". Both of us are hikers and backpackers of many years, so I think we find it hard to sit and glass for a long time. (We got better over time.) Perhaps buying a spotting scope would force me to spend more time looking closely. Anyway, we tended to go with the "let's go somewhere else" strategy. Looking back on it, this probably meant we spent too much time in the truck, moving from place to place, when we should have been hunting. But I'm still not sure what the right balance is between staying longer or moving along. I'm leaning toward something like this: ideally, find a big area that you can hunt all day. Cover miles. If no luck, move the next day. Half-day trips are probably fine too (moving in the middle of the day to a second spot), but hitting up 3+ places in a day probably means you're spending too much time in the truck. Let me know if I'm totally wrong! Maybe the answer depends on the animal and the land.
In my first year I had the great fortune of getting a small buck on opening morning - pure dumb luck, but I was also hunting a better unit (11/211). As a result I never got the opportunity to learn what a multi-day unsuccessful hunt does to the mind. Keeping up morale after barely seeing animals for multiple days is much harder than I thought it would be. This is something I have to think about and do a better job preparing for. A tipi or wall tent with a stove would sure be nice - we were pretty much the only campers we saw sleeping in little backpacking tents. On the other hand, a big comfy heated tent might be too tempting to return to.
As for avoiding hunting pressure, we probably should have made more effort to get a few miles away from the road. Again, I'm not sure this is always better than setting up near private land ag edges, but we should have switched it up with some longer hikes more often. Looking back on it, we did a few good hikes, but most of the time we were probably within a mile of some road access. That would have meant probably spending more time in NFS land, where there is more contiguous public land and miles to cover.
Any thoughts or feedback on these lessons would be much appreciated. My freezer is empty, so now it all comes down to my 4th season cow elk hunt next month. Fortunately that is a good unit (61) and I did manage to get one last year.
I opened a thread earlier asking for some hunting advice in CO 2nd season GMU 33 for buck hunting. To show my gratefulness I thought I'd report back my experience and some lessons for beginners like myself.
Neither my friend nor I got a buck. This was only his first hunt, and my second year, but of course we had high hopes. In fact, we never even saw a buck on public land. In five days of hunting, we only saw a small forky on a golf course (we promptly headed to the adjacent BLM in the hope that he'd come our way, but no luck). This unit gives out 500 buck tags, and it is also an OTC bull unit, so as you can imagine it was very crowded. Everywhere we hunted, we generally saw multiple other hunters. So it was a challenging hunt - for us, anyway.
I'm still trying to process the lessons from this one. I go back and forth between opposing ideas. On the one hand, I would sometimes feel that we needed to go further and further back from the roads, away from hunting pressure. On the other hand, we only ever saw deer at lower elevations, at river bottoms, mostly on private, so I also often felt that the smartest way was to glass draws closer to towns, leading out to good private land ag. This strategy did give us our only decent encounter with deer within shooting distance - but it turned out to be a group of does. Perhaps bucks are less likely to keep this close to people once the hunting pressure is on? Or they are more dispersed in general? In any case, I felt like I was constantly changing my mind about this, and that bit of switching took away from our hunting time a bit.
We would often head out to an area, hike and glass for a few hours, and then head back to the truck to try out another area. Once again, my mind would go back and forth between opposing ideas: "we should slow down and glass another hour or two - maybe something will turn up" vs "we've covered this area and found nothing - let's move somewhere else". Both of us are hikers and backpackers of many years, so I think we find it hard to sit and glass for a long time. (We got better over time.) Perhaps buying a spotting scope would force me to spend more time looking closely. Anyway, we tended to go with the "let's go somewhere else" strategy. Looking back on it, this probably meant we spent too much time in the truck, moving from place to place, when we should have been hunting. But I'm still not sure what the right balance is between staying longer or moving along. I'm leaning toward something like this: ideally, find a big area that you can hunt all day. Cover miles. If no luck, move the next day. Half-day trips are probably fine too (moving in the middle of the day to a second spot), but hitting up 3+ places in a day probably means you're spending too much time in the truck. Let me know if I'm totally wrong! Maybe the answer depends on the animal and the land.
In my first year I had the great fortune of getting a small buck on opening morning - pure dumb luck, but I was also hunting a better unit (11/211). As a result I never got the opportunity to learn what a multi-day unsuccessful hunt does to the mind. Keeping up morale after barely seeing animals for multiple days is much harder than I thought it would be. This is something I have to think about and do a better job preparing for. A tipi or wall tent with a stove would sure be nice - we were pretty much the only campers we saw sleeping in little backpacking tents. On the other hand, a big comfy heated tent might be too tempting to return to.
As for avoiding hunting pressure, we probably should have made more effort to get a few miles away from the road. Again, I'm not sure this is always better than setting up near private land ag edges, but we should have switched it up with some longer hikes more often. Looking back on it, we did a few good hikes, but most of the time we were probably within a mile of some road access. That would have meant probably spending more time in NFS land, where there is more contiguous public land and miles to cover.
Any thoughts or feedback on these lessons would be much appreciated. My freezer is empty, so now it all comes down to my 4th season cow elk hunt next month. Fortunately that is a good unit (61) and I did manage to get one last year.
