I am fairly new to this hunting gig having gone rifle hunting for the first time last year. Justin and I decided to get started since our boys are still young and we want to be able to take them when they get old enough (and we want to kind of know what we are doing before they get involved ). So we jumped in with both feet last year: Antelope, Deer, and Elk.

Antelope hunting has been fantastic. We both filled two tags last year and I filled two this year including my first buck of any type. Elk hunting last year was great as well with both of us filling our tags on a great snow hunt.

Deer hunting has been a completely different story! Last year we took the advice of a buddy and went hunting near Eagle, CO. The result was horrific. Not only did we not fill either tag…we didn’t see a single deer the entire time..not one! We chalked it up to a bad year and our inexperience. So we changed venues this year and got deer tags near Craig, CO. Everything we heard was that this was the place to be so our luck was certain to change. We were so confident that we even brought Nick with us and got buck tags instead of doe tags.

The result was better right? W-R-O-N-G. Here is the grand total of deer we saw this year: Zip, zero, zilch, nada. Skunked again! And once again we didn’t even see a deer! We saw plenty of antelope (including a huge buck that makes me want to go back for him next year). Very. Frustrating.

We have determined that one of these reasons (or a combination) is why we have had bad luck with deer:

1. We have no idea what we are doing…inexperience (I’m 100% sure this is at least part of the issue)
2. We are in the wrong place (although we’ve tried 2 different locations)
3. We are doing it wrong (we hiked, we sat, we drove…not sure which we’re supposed to do)
4. There are no deer in Colorado (felt like it anyway)

So for now we are going to do one of the following going forward:

1. Find someone who knows what they are doing (and where) and go with them.
2. Start accumulating preference points until we can hunt in a better location.
3. Give up on deer for the foreseeable future.

It certainly wasn’t a total loss. You can’t call two days with buddies and time spent in God’s country a waste of time…it was still fun, just not as much fun as we were hoping to have. And the Elk hunt is still to come so there is plenty to look forward to (might even come back with two this year). And the deer hunt keeps us humble and trying to improve…and it gives us something to pass along to our boys…you can’t win at everything, but you shouldn’t give up either (that is unless we give up .

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Guy Stuff, Hunting, Recreation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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