The First Hunt Of The Season

A good guy named Patrick was my first guided hunt of the season. Patrick is one of my fishing clients who likes to fish with his young kids. The hunting trip was for Patrick to enjoy his first Mule Deer hunt. After his arrival I could tell Patrick did some research and was packing all the right gear. Day one found us covering some ground and glassing up plenty of deer. The doe population is at a all time high. We spotted many bucks as well, maybe 20. The bigger bucks on the first day were those kind that are still one year away from being shooters on our ranches. Some deer were tempting but I knew we could do better.

On day two we walked into a spot where we seen a good buck the evening before. When we got close to the area we found to many deer to count leaving a barley field. We had many groups of deer to avoid to try to find the big buck. We worked our way around and through lots of does and young bucks. I could see some bigger bucks out in the distance. The big ones were headed down a big canyon. The problem was, we were busting out a bunch of deer the get to the canyon. At one point I thought about giving up but decided to look into the big canyon. When we looked over the canyon we immediately saw a next level deer! I quickly ranged the deer at 157 yard. The big buck was staring in our direction as Patrick got his rifle in position. It was to late for the big buck, we had the sun and wind in our favor. We felt a since of accomplishment as we put the tag on the old buck.