Mule Deer Scouting – Backpacking with a Purpose!

Ridgline camp. Plenty of air in that tent!

Backpacking…summer weekends run out way too fast! What happened to June, and why does July have only one weekend left in it? My list of weekend backpacking and other activities hasn’t grown much shorter, but the time to complete them surely has. My hunting seasons start in mid-September and often go up to Christmas. I need to complete a number of backpacking trips. We are still needing to spend some time scouting for deer, sheep, and elk. Being a nerd, I did the math…I’d combine them.

The first weekend backpacking and scouting trip was a general fail. While we learned a few things, the nearby brushfire caused us to turn tail and head for home. Fast-forward one weekend, and I’m determined to follow through.

we located a small area that was secluded and not intuitively the best place to hunt

Backpacking Preparation

We packed our gear, food, and clothing on Thursday night, weighing each pack to know what we were facing. This wouldn’t be a huge pack in. We only had two miles and about 600 feet of elevation gain, along with 400 feet of elevation loss. We figured we could leave from work on Friday evening, drive to the “trail head” (no trail, but the spot where we parked our truck anyway), hike in for an hour or so, and still have 30 minutes to set camp and an hour of glassing.

To quote George W. Bush, sort of, I misunderestimated the time required to hike in, which is pretty normal in these situations. In my defense, I was thinking one hour to hike two miles with only 600 feet of vertical. This is about right on well maintained trails. What I failed to account for was the thickness of the brush and the steepness of the climb.

Anyway, we ate our sub sandwich dinner on the tailgate while we swapped into our hiking clothes and finished off our pack loading. We left the truck right on time, with no wildfires in sight! As I’ve alluded, we didn’t arrive in camp when we expected. It may have been our stopping to view the dozen elk in the first herd or the second herd of 50, almost entirely cows; or it may have been the numerous deer sightings that required us to stop and evaluate, but more likely it was the steep brushy climb to camp. We had some daylight left and used it to glass and evaluate deer.

Off We Go!

I had hoped to camp on or near the highest peak, but 20 mph wind up there made us think twice about this. We opted for a saddle a little further on, where the 15 mph wind was tolerable. Careful teamwork was needed to build out our tent without it blowing away on us. Somehow we managed to get it all pinned down and our beds and pads made out. We haven’t backpacked with our Golden Retriever, so this was sort of a maiden voyage. The best approach seemed to evade us. We finally opted for the warm-fuzzy method of cladding his paws/claws in boots and making a little bed inside the tent, in between ours. I won’t lie…I was a little nervous about him ending our expensive, beloved, and discontinued air mattresses. Luckily, our precautions held and so did the air mattresses through the night.

We ate a light pre-bed snack of some almonds and jerky and sipped a little water. It was very warm, so we left the tent fly in the bag. All night the wind blew. It ranged from a light breeze to 20-or-so mph gusts. We could tell, because our Big Agnes Seedhouse UL3 isn’t known for its wind-cutting abilities, sans fly. It basically kept the bugs out and gave us walls to roll against.

We awoke to…wind. We gathered binoculars and spotting scope and started away from the tent as soon as it was light enough to see. For sure we wouldn’t have long in the summer heat to find deer before they hunted their beds. We weren’t 100 yards from our tent when my wife spotted the first group of deer below us 800 yards. It turned out to be a bachelor herd of a dozen mule deer bucks.

We had some time to look them over and found three or four mature four-points, with one a truly nice buck. At about 26 or 27 inches wide, he had tall horns with deep and well-defined forks. I find it hard to judge mass when bucks are in the velvet, but he seemed above average but not truly massive. Suddenly, those bucks all started staring down below us at something, then they bolted to our right and over the next hill. We don’t know what spooked them, but they never so much as glanced at us.

Camp making its way back into the packs…

Around the hill, we found another seven or so bucks, none of which were what we’d be hoping for. No does, so far this morning, so apparently we were in the right pla ce for our purpose. We were two miles from the nearest road, the one where we left our truck. We weren’t on the highest peak around, with several 10,000 foot peaks nearby, but we had located a small area that was secluded and not intuitively the best place to hunt. This is where you find deer!

As the sun was coming up and the morning began to warm, my wife found another little buck about a mile away in the shade near a saddle. She said there was only one, unless he had some friends. Well, when she leaves it open like that, my competitive nature kicks in and I set about to find those friends. Unfortunately, could not locate a bunch of additional deer near that little buck. Fortunately, I did find one. This was clearly the biggest buck of the trip, with antlers both well outside of his ears and tall. After looking for a while, we concluded he was clearly a better sized buck than the nice one we’d seen below camp. The deer headed to their beds post-haste once the sun came up, giving us only about an hour to glass.

Heavy-duty carbon legs and ultralight Vortex scope.

We packed up camp and made it back to the truck in about the same two hours it took to get to camp the night before. This was just a simple little hike, but we would not have located any of those bucks if we had stayed at the truck and spotted from there. True, we may have seen some others, and particularly because I would have had my bigger scope at the truck; however, we found two very good bucks in a place that very few, if any, other hunters would bother to hunt. We now have an ace-in-the-hole location for opening week.

Takeaways

I expect that we will plan another overnight backpacking trip into a different section of the same general area before season starts. If there were 21 bucks located in 60 minutes, and two of them were clear shooters (three or four of them would have given anyone pause), we should have more to choose from in the several canyons that are slightly further from the end of the road, wouldn’t you guess? I would.

Our dreams of backpacking the Ruby Crest trail this year, taking our second trip to Ruby Dome, or targeting some high-mountain cutthroats this summer may be in jeopardy. The clock is running out on us, and we still have to fit in one or two more scouting trips to southern Nevada to pattern desert sheep and find, hopefully, more than one Boone and Crockett-sized ram. We will scout if we’ve filled tags and freed up time after September 15, as we’ve filled our calendar with hunts after then. That’s ok, as we are finding a way to turn our scouting trips into a more effective endeavor. This is from the perspective of finding near-trophy sized deer. Also, we are getting to do our backpacking and high-mountain camping at the same time.

I’d encourage you to consider where you can do the same. Is there a location that gives you the freedom to hike just a mile or three into roadless country? Can you combine your sense of hiking and backpacking adventure with wildlife watching or scouting your big-game season animals? Well, for us, time is the issue and so we’ve combined the two. I hope to apply these lessons to next year and take some hikes and long trips just for the sake of them. For this year I think I will have to multi-task! Have fun!