steveokanevo
FNG
I'll post to the meat pole thread but I wanted to offer a little bit more detailed information regarding the overall trip. I feel like access, weather, road quality, and hunt quality are big questions that easterners have especially south easterners. I hope to answer all of these here in. I really think no one knows until they just actually do it for themselves but there is a lot of uncertainty in driving 21 hours into the unknown. This was my second trip to WY. The first I soloed and it was not fun for me, bad weather, high hunter numbers, no public access (easy to draw unit), and extreme drive times all contributed to my uneasiness in 2018. That was a tag I drew off my second choice while keeping my PP. This tag is the one I have been waiting to draw and kind of chasing point creep since 2016. My hunting partner did not draw but was still good enough to come with me.
We drove from TN to WY which took 1.5 days we arrived Tuesday afternoon with season opening on Friday morning. On this day, other than ranchers, we had the unit to ourselves it seemed. We spent the afternoon checking out one side of the unit close to town and camped on BLM land that night. The roads were asphalt/gravel and the weather was perfect. We did slide down a dirt road to check out some antelope in a basin, not a 2 track, this was a dirt road not gravel or chert. We looked over 20+ bucks and saw a total of 100-120 antelope at distances of 200 yds to 2 miles.
I can not express enough the importance of a good set of 10x binoculars. I used Maven C1 and they were great. I also bought a used Swaro STS which was great also. The vortex summit tripod I bought did not pair well with the STS due to it's height. It's more in line with an angled spotter height, unless you have really short legs. Also there was some adapting to get the vortex base plate onto the spotter as well. I used it mostly sitting or kneeling rather than standing. I also need to comment on the heat mirage looking through the spotter. The mirage is not near as noticeable through the binos as it is the spotter and it did obscure most of what we were trying to look at. This made it difficult to judge particular bucks a majority of the day. I will add the obvious that the closer we were the easier it was to judge through the mirage. 800-900yds was extremely difficult while 500-400 was a lot easier. I would advise anyone attempting this hunt to stop and pull out the binoculars and check everything. We skipped over a ton of antelope just by thinking we could spot them with the naked eye. We learned this by forcing ourselves to take the time and comb over the landscape with the binos.
The second day we pulled camp and burnt the roads up. We looked over approximately 50 bucks and saw around 200 antelope total; eventually we located what we considered (1) buck that was upper 70's possibly pushing 80" and another that was a close second. One was barely on a WIA and the other was on a very small block of BLM. We also spent some time down some 2 tracks and hiked a mile in on some BLM and located another sizeable buck. He was in that magic land of mirage haze and we didn't know for sure how good he was but dubbed him a shooter. We found several good bucks a decent piece off the roads that had does, one of them being the buck we would take (Plan A). Plan A got moved around a lot schedule wise because he was so far away and was hard to judge. We also kept saying, "Nobody is going to go after him. He's too far off the road." I also say "we" as this was a team effort. I had the tag, I pulled the trigger but this would have been nothing but disaster had I not a hunting partner. It was going to rain Wednesday night so we grabbed a hotel room.
Thursday morning we tried to relocate the giants we had seen the day before and were unsuccessful while we did relocate 2 of the bucks from the day before and 1 of those being Plan A. They were both in the same place doing the same thing. We picked up a pattern here. The bucks would bed up high and push their does down to feed in the morning then 9-10 oclock they'd push them back up to bed then between 1-3 oclock back down and so on. There are also plenty of bucks and does standing next to the road but all that we saw in that proximity were not something we considered worthy of a 7 year tag. Mostly yearlings or smaller bucks would be there. We also noticed that if we stopped to look at these antelope that are within 400 yds of the road they would hang around about 20 secs and leave. We picked up on this quick and tried to avoid this type of behaviour. It did not carry over to the other people that began to show up in the unit as they would fly up and whoop sideways in the road while trying to get a spotting scope out to look the antelope would bolt. Totaly unnecessary for something 200 yds out. I mean, cmon, roll through throw up the bino's you'll know if he's good or not. If they would've kept driving and found some cover to come back and look it would have ended different for them. Thursday afternoon we found the largest buck we had seen so far and he was 442 yds from the road up a draw that no one bothered to look at. I broke the rule and tried to get a pic of him through the spotter and he got nervous, rounded up his does, and trotted behind a finger. He was very tall, heavy, and had enormous cutters that seemed so long they turned over. Assuming he was on the schedule as all the other bucks with does were we dubbed him Hollar buck and he was going to be the first stop Friday morning. We also located what we thought was a decent buck a little farther down the road and bumped him to stop number 2 should Hollar buck not work out. It rained on us before we got out to the highway and the roads became slicker than a lizard in a grease bucket. We fish tailed a mile back to asphalt and grabbed a hotel room again not wanting to camp in the mud.
We drove from TN to WY which took 1.5 days we arrived Tuesday afternoon with season opening on Friday morning. On this day, other than ranchers, we had the unit to ourselves it seemed. We spent the afternoon checking out one side of the unit close to town and camped on BLM land that night. The roads were asphalt/gravel and the weather was perfect. We did slide down a dirt road to check out some antelope in a basin, not a 2 track, this was a dirt road not gravel or chert. We looked over 20+ bucks and saw a total of 100-120 antelope at distances of 200 yds to 2 miles.
I can not express enough the importance of a good set of 10x binoculars. I used Maven C1 and they were great. I also bought a used Swaro STS which was great also. The vortex summit tripod I bought did not pair well with the STS due to it's height. It's more in line with an angled spotter height, unless you have really short legs. Also there was some adapting to get the vortex base plate onto the spotter as well. I used it mostly sitting or kneeling rather than standing. I also need to comment on the heat mirage looking through the spotter. The mirage is not near as noticeable through the binos as it is the spotter and it did obscure most of what we were trying to look at. This made it difficult to judge particular bucks a majority of the day. I will add the obvious that the closer we were the easier it was to judge through the mirage. 800-900yds was extremely difficult while 500-400 was a lot easier. I would advise anyone attempting this hunt to stop and pull out the binoculars and check everything. We skipped over a ton of antelope just by thinking we could spot them with the naked eye. We learned this by forcing ourselves to take the time and comb over the landscape with the binos.
The second day we pulled camp and burnt the roads up. We looked over approximately 50 bucks and saw around 200 antelope total; eventually we located what we considered (1) buck that was upper 70's possibly pushing 80" and another that was a close second. One was barely on a WIA and the other was on a very small block of BLM. We also spent some time down some 2 tracks and hiked a mile in on some BLM and located another sizeable buck. He was in that magic land of mirage haze and we didn't know for sure how good he was but dubbed him a shooter. We found several good bucks a decent piece off the roads that had does, one of them being the buck we would take (Plan A). Plan A got moved around a lot schedule wise because he was so far away and was hard to judge. We also kept saying, "Nobody is going to go after him. He's too far off the road." I also say "we" as this was a team effort. I had the tag, I pulled the trigger but this would have been nothing but disaster had I not a hunting partner. It was going to rain Wednesday night so we grabbed a hotel room.
Thursday morning we tried to relocate the giants we had seen the day before and were unsuccessful while we did relocate 2 of the bucks from the day before and 1 of those being Plan A. They were both in the same place doing the same thing. We picked up a pattern here. The bucks would bed up high and push their does down to feed in the morning then 9-10 oclock they'd push them back up to bed then between 1-3 oclock back down and so on. There are also plenty of bucks and does standing next to the road but all that we saw in that proximity were not something we considered worthy of a 7 year tag. Mostly yearlings or smaller bucks would be there. We also noticed that if we stopped to look at these antelope that are within 400 yds of the road they would hang around about 20 secs and leave. We picked up on this quick and tried to avoid this type of behaviour. It did not carry over to the other people that began to show up in the unit as they would fly up and whoop sideways in the road while trying to get a spotting scope out to look the antelope would bolt. Totaly unnecessary for something 200 yds out. I mean, cmon, roll through throw up the bino's you'll know if he's good or not. If they would've kept driving and found some cover to come back and look it would have ended different for them. Thursday afternoon we found the largest buck we had seen so far and he was 442 yds from the road up a draw that no one bothered to look at. I broke the rule and tried to get a pic of him through the spotter and he got nervous, rounded up his does, and trotted behind a finger. He was very tall, heavy, and had enormous cutters that seemed so long they turned over. Assuming he was on the schedule as all the other bucks with does were we dubbed him Hollar buck and he was going to be the first stop Friday morning. We also located what we thought was a decent buck a little farther down the road and bumped him to stop number 2 should Hollar buck not work out. It rained on us before we got out to the highway and the roads became slicker than a lizard in a grease bucket. We fish tailed a mile back to asphalt and grabbed a hotel room again not wanting to camp in the mud.
