Owyhee Desert Mule Deer

Beautiful Owyhee Desert buck held by Amanda Boyce with her mom Tammy.

High Desert Mule Deer

When I was about thirteen or fourteen years old I saw the biggest mule deer buck of my life. We weren’t in the high mountains or thick buckbrush country, nor were we hunting deer at the time. We were chukar hunting on the Owyhee Desert in January. There were two bucks well over 30-inches wide and the bigger of the two was magnificent. Tall, heavy, and wide with deep forks. For mule deer hunters, the buck of dreams.

I’ve dreamt of those bucks for the past 35 or more years and I’ve romanticized the Owyhee Desert mule deer ever since. Of course, those were bucks on winter range, but I’ve never been able to get the thought out of my mind about that vast open desert. Now for those of you who don’t know, the Owyhee is a sagebrush-covered volcanic plain that stretches over Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho at an elevation of about 5400 feet in Nevada, down to 4500 feet or so in Oregon. It is a cold, snowy, muddy, isolated desert. Heaven on earth.

Idaho Backstory

My daughter, Amanda, graduated from College of Idaho in 2014 where she’d attended on an academic and four-year soccer scholarship (go, Yotes!). Between high school and college soccer, there were essentially eight years that precluded her from hunting. She started her hunting experience by bagging two muleys, one pronghorn, two cow elk, and a bull elk, going six-for-six on her tags. Now that she is an Idaho resident, living in Boise, we had to learn a little something about hunting in Idaho.

Knowing that the Idaho side of the Owyhee Desert is pretty special country, she and I decided to have her try for a mule deer tag there. She got it on her first try, which is about a 10:1 shot, so she was quite lucky to draw. She started talking to her hunting friends and clients in Boise and began to learn some about the area. I spoke with Jim, one of my best friends from high school who hunted there a couple of years ago with his dad; I also visited with Don, one of my friends who took his son-in-law on the same hunt the year before. Interestingly, they hunted the same general area, which isn’t the typical location most Idaho hunters go.

Bliss

Starting in late summer, I pored over GoogleEarth, ESRI’s ArcGIS (link) to begin to get a feel for the country. Based on Jim’s and Don’s advice, I pretty well honed in on one area. Sure, I looked it all over, but both men told me they had seen no other hunters on their trips. That is my one criteria that makes hunting a lot easier: no people. Best of all, I was going to be in country that was legendary to me. This is where my dad’s lifetime friend and my mentor Lee started life. It is where he loved to explore as an adult. How could this get better? Hunting with my wife and daughter in new country that was so emotionally meaningful to me…and chasing mule deer! Bliss.

On paper, everything looked fine. Roads led to everything I wanted to see. There was a surprising amount of water, feed, and cover out there. Don, a retired game warden explained that the deer they saw were resident deer and not migrants. It was all shaping up to be an epic adventure. I was dreaming of those monster muleys of my youth.

Reality

My wife and I could only squeeze out a couple of days for scouting between hunts. That is the great thing about being part of a clan of hunters…even though I had zero tags in 2017, I was able to go on six big game hunts spanning September through December. Anyway, I digress and Tammy and I set out to explore my fabled Owyhee Desert. Initially, I was a little shocked and excited to find out that this part of the Owyhee wasn’t too rocky. That only lasted for an hour or two. The Snake River plain is a chunked-up lava flow that creates some of the most difficult rocky roads on the planet. My wife was super not impressed!

On that first scouting trip, we found deer, and several were very impressive younger deer. We found a lot of water and a lot of good brush. Clearly, this was going to be a good hunt. We had some tense moments trying to complete a loop back to civilization down a rocky draw. With eight miles to go, the road became very faint. We had no idea whether we could get through. We also knew we were at least four hours to backtrack, through some killer boulder piles. Lucky for us, we made it out ok, with only one stream crossing that put our hearts in our throats. Yikes.

Our second scouting trip did locate a section of the Owyhee where the roads were much more civilized. Four wheel drive was still needed, but we could hit speeds up to 15 miles per hour occasionally and only rarely needed low range. We found a lot more water and some more nice bucks. We camped in the back of our truck, under the stars, like we’ve come to enjoy. Basically, we had accomplished Scouting-101. We had an 80-percent knowledge of the roads in the area and the icing on the cake was our new understanding of the cover, feed, and water. We were set.

It Begins

On our “opening day” we met Amanda and her friend Mark in the dark on the highway north of Duck Valley. They had come from Boise and we had traveled up from Elko. Amanda, being a bit like her farther, beat us there by at least five minutes, while we were exactly on time. Small victories. We immediately assessed that we had a couple of challenges. First, the truck they were in had highway tires which is a straight-up no-go on the Owyhee. The trick would be to take that truck in as far as we safely could, and then pile/squeeze into our truck.

Our second challenge would be the weather which was threatening snow and rain. On the Owyhee, good roads can turn to bottomless bogholes with only a small storm. The flats channel water into low spots. Low spots tend to exist in the roads. I don’t care for that kind of drama. Our plan was to drive in to the good deer country, set up a tent camp in sub-freezing November weather, and have fun for three days or so. If needed, we’d regroup and do it again the following weekend. Simple, as long as the weather cooperated.

Opening Morning

We went directly to what I thought would be the sure-fire muley location. The three of us left Tammy with a spotting scope and binoculars to spend a few hours glassing a huge sagebrush basin. We traversed a mesa top to smoke a big muley buck in his brushy bed under basalt rimrocks. It didn’t go according to plan. The wind was fierce and the deer weren’t there. We chewed up the morning and to my complete disbelief, Tammy had only located a single deer…a very small buck. I was so surprised.

Deer don’t love wind and I don’t love wind even more. It was very windy. Houston, we had a problem and our Plan A was effectively shattered. We were hunting in the part of the country we’d seen the most deer previously. This was the area Don and I had talked about, and I knew the deer were there. The wind just wasn’t going to cooperate with the plan.

Regroup

Part and parcel of being successful at big game hunting is knowing when to hold your cards and knowing when to fold them. A different tactic was clearly needed. Given the windy conditions and 20-degree temperature, we made the decision to cover more country. We headed into the more civilized roaded section that was the country Jim and I had discussed. As we sat out of the wind eating lunch, it began to dawn on me that pitching a tent in 25 mile per hour winds at 25 degrees in the dark was going to be both challenging and miserable. Oh well, onward.

We decided to try a long rimrock and slope that was covered in thick Wyoming big sage, bitterbrush areas, and some serviceberry. Good cover near water and food which is ideal. Now the strategy was to move and look as fast and as often as we could. These were not normal muley tactics for us, but we needed to adapt to the conditions. With zero hunters in our way, we had our hunting grounds all to ourselves, and late into the afternoon we found a confused fawn near a water trough. This lost fawn clearly did not want to leave, so we moved on to leave her to find her team. It wasn’t 300 yards later that we spotted some deer near the top of a rimrock.

Decisions

Tammy and Amanda quickly assessed that there were three mature bucks in the group, with a big three-point clearly the harem-master. He kept the two four-points at bay, circling his girls. None of these bucks represented my mythical Owyhee dream-buck, but they were all shooters. My daughter quickly made the decision to hunt the tall, heavy, but somewhat narrow four-point. She assessed where she wanted to make her hunt and asked my opinion. It was a sound idea. She could get within 300 yards with her plan, and I couldn’t think of a better one.

Amanda and I hiked out of site of the deer at a distance of about 800 yards. A few nervous minutes got us out of site, and I glassed them before they disappeared to be sure we were ok. They either didn’t know we were there or more likely just weren’t interested. Perfect. We covered the distance to an elevated outcrop on the slope below them. Peeking our heads over the outcrop and ranging the deer, I was getting 340 to 350 yards. With a 20 to 25 mph wind quartering towards us, but mostly side-on with occasional gusts, I advised Amanda to pass on the shot.

Amanda’s Assessment

Amanda asked me to estimate the hold-over for the shot, using the ballistic reticle in her scope. The shot would require her to keep both of the first two cross-hatches on the animal, and use the center between them. I assessed the windage at about eight inches. Again I counselled her to consider passing on this shot and continue the hunt. She checked her shot numerous times and finally she said something like “Dad, I’m steady and confident. This will be fine.” Decision made.

Amanda having made her decision, I took on my new role as spotter. As I watched her buck forage, the muzzle blast from her Sako 270 Win. shook me. Note to self: when shooting out of a rockpile, a large rock to the side and in front of the muzzle directs blast the opposite direction! Ouch! Even with earplugs, it was a struggle to get back on the deer with only binoculars. What I glimpsed was possibly the tail-end of a scene where a mule deer buck dropped like a stone. That, or it was what I’d hoped to see, but I couldn’t tell!

I quickly switched my approach to the old Cat-in-the-Hat ploy: calculatus eliminatus! I searched the herd for the three bucks. One, two. Again, one, two…one, two…try as I might, I couldn’t find the third buck. Finally, I broke radio silence and sought post-shot counsel from my wife. She agreed that she could only find two bucks as they crested the rise. Three bucks enter…two bucks leave.

Owyhee Finale

I pinpointed the sagebrush I thought my phantom stone-drop buck landed behind, and we started our hike. We arrived upon the scene of a heart-shot buck that dropped stone dead without so much as a step, let alone a Scooby-Doo spinout. Whatever had happened to him, he was out like a light before I could get my binoculars on him at the shot.

I was so proud of my daughter. She had made a confident hunter’s decision after assessing the situation against her capabilities and executed it well. I don’t think I would have been as confident if the roles were switched. Amanda has become a very smart, tenacious, and skilled hunter in just a short period of time. There is no way for me to express in words how proud I am of her accomplishments as a hunter. `

I was also a bit disappointed she turned “my” epic Owyhee saga into an opening-day success story. Where was the drama in that? My mixed emotions faded quickly as I realized I would NOT be pitching a tent in the headlights at zero-degree wind chill. A short, warm three-hour trip home to skin and hang the deer sounded a heck of a lot better to me at that time. Life is about trade-offs, or so they say.

This was truly a great hunt. No one lost an eye or finger and we all made it home safely. The deer was down humanely and Amanda made a legendary shot. This was a perfect segue to future pursuits on the Owyhee. Based on this experience, I know I will one day soon return as an archer to search for that mythical Owyhee buck!