Today felt kind of weird. I walked so fast to get to where I wanted to go that my legs burned like hell during my walk. I left two hours before daylight to get to my destination before daylight.
The place I chose to hunt this morning is a place that I feel like I need to be at before the sun even begins to show any type of presence in the skyline. I made it without any problems. I actually arrived in the area around 6:20 a.m.
The woods quickly settled around me as I waited for the dark sky to begin turning gray. The hours passed quickly, and the woods seemed eerily quiet ….. and dead. Nothing moved, not even a bird.
I figured the deer would be on the move today since I saw a lot of fresh tracks yesterday. I was very wrong. My dad and I didn’t see a deer between us. I covered a lot of ground before coming out of the woods around 2:00 p.m. and never cut a fresh track. Dad covered the same amount of ground in another direction and never cut a fresh track either. It appears that the deer just weren’t moving in the piece of woods where we were hunting. I guess that’s the way it goes.
Overall, the weekend was pretty good. It felt good to be in the woods, but the days weren’t without incident. The downfall about hunting public land is that other people can hunt there, too. Nobody owns the land.
Unfortunately, a person who knows where Brian hunts sent someone in the same exact area. The person even followed Brian’s tracks — as in track for track in the snow. The person shot a nice buck and then bragged about shooting another buck earlier in the year but not hunting there now because he hasn’t seen any deer there since shooting the other one.
I’ve never enjoyed hunting on the snow, but I enjoy it even less now that I’m hunting around more people. It amazes me how disrespectful some people really are. It’s one thing to follow someone’s tracks, but it’s an entirely different thing to follow them step for step and hunt the same exact area.
Common sense would tell most people to find an area where no one is parked or hunting. If there are miles upon miles of public access road frontage, there’s no reason to be up someone else’s butt who is already hunting a place. It’s different in smaller areas, but in a 6-million acre park, there really isn’t an excuse for it.
I’m done ranting for now, but sometimes things get under my skin and this didn’t even affect me. I’ve also noticed that snow makes many average hunters turn into much better hunters. It also makes people a lot braver. People think they can’t get lost when there’s snow on the ground because they can see their tracks. I definitely prefer to hunt on bare ground for a number of reasons. The only think I like about the snow is that it’s easier to see deer from longer distances.
I’ll stick at it this week. The season has passed quickly. There are only seven days left of rifle season in northern New York. I’ll be sad to see it go. I’ve hunted much harder this year than in the last 10 years.
I’ve given out three or four free passes to younger bucks this year. Twenty years ago, I used to do it before anyone even talked about it. Now, many people claim they’re passing up bucks. I bought a video camera to capture some of them on video, so I could show people instead of tell them because so many people didn’t believe it. Who passes up ANY buck in the Adirondacks?
Recently, I began to think about it. I don’t think very many people do pass up Adirondack bucks, but a lot of people claim they do. It doesn’t take much to carry small camera in your pocket to record a few of the events. I challenge all of you to capture some of your passes and show them to others. Try to make all of us believers. Video do not lie. While it’s hard to get video footage at times, there are other times that it’s pretty easy, especially if you’re sitting and are able to watch the deer for a while. I don’t capture all of them, but I’ve been able to get a few here and there.
Snow………some people love it, some people hate it. I just put up with it. I guess it creates some nice opportunities for good pictures.
Here are a few signposts I found that have been hit this year.
