Hey all!
Have a question, instead of telling me where to hunt....I'm asking how to hunt.
How do you approach hunting mule deer in more arid terrain?
Elevation is 6,500 to 8,500 feet, lots of canyons, primarily covered with sagebrush and scrub oak slopes with pinyon and juniper woodlands. Water sources are intermittent streams, mainly from runoff, maybe a water hole in the lower elevations at the canyon floor. As far as remoteness, there are many unimproved roads and trails throughout but hunting pressure isn't too bad.
The time of year will be end of October/early November.
Thank you!
OP, think of it as a process, knocking out things in order. Before sharing my process, it's important to note that Mule Deer can go for days at a time without watering, even in extremely dry desert - and it's no problem for them have their bedding locations multiple miles from the nearest source of water. But they need to eat
daily to prepare for winter, and generally prefer to bed reasonably close to their food - often doing a circuit of browsing during the night, ending up back at their beds at dawn.
My process is to start by e-scouting via OnX and Google Earth as soon as I get a tag - and I'm scouting first and foremost for likely food sources. In the desert, especially at that time of year (oct/nov/dec), it usually means bitterbrush. But if you have forested areas - hunt the edges of treelines and timber cuts, and look for burns about 2-4 years old. Forest floor gets poor sunlight, so edible brush also grows poorly there. This is why logging activity where you have cuts, treelines in general, and burn areas attract mule deer - it gets sunlight and the food grows. Hunt the edges of these places hard to find game trails - they bed in the brush but feed more in the open, coming in and out of the edges. But you'll need to identify what muleys eat in your area, and look for patches of that.
My process typically includes a total of about 3-4 weeks of scouting pre-season in total spread across the entire summer, beginning as soon as I get that tag. My e-scouting actually begins a bit when I'm applying for tags, but as soon as I get a tag I'm e-scouting hard and within a couple of days I'm out in the field.
Specifically, I'm hitting those food sources really, really hard, cutting sign - looking for big buck tracks. Big, blocky, splayed hooves, especially with one dragging in some of the steps. That's a big, old, heavy buck. Then I track that guy, ideally, right back to his bedding area. I'm not concerned in any way with bumping him - I'm tracking hard and fast, trying to find his bedding area. Because I'm not looking for him - just his feeding and bedding areas. Often they'll be close to each other, especially if they're in a great spot for his security (ability to see forever, smell well, tucked away with his back to a rock barrier of some kind, etc.)
Once I find both of these places, I'll dial in on several good glassing spots that give me coverage over these spots - high places that I can access discretely and have backup locations for if the wind is shifting.
That's all I'm really trying to do on this first scouting trip - cut sign to and from his food and bed, find my glassing hides for these promising spots, and scouting my routes to those glassing spots once I find them.
Second scouting trip, at least for that spot, will be at least 3 days later and up to a week later - I've bumped the hell out of him being in his bedroom, but he'll be back, because he chose that place because of its general security and access to food, so it's his primo territory. This second trip is where I'm trying to first get eyes on him. If you're out in May/June, muley coats are a really cool reddish color that is far easier to glass up than when they start to turn hard-horn in August-ish, which is when their coats also go grey-ghost on you. Also, when their coats are red and their antlers in velvet, they're sensitive to pain and the antlers are more easily damaged by brush, so you'll often find bucks bachelored up together, out in the relative open. But once they go hard-horn, the biggest ones especially will be getting much deeper into cover by themselves, in part because it doesn't hurt or damage their antlers at that point.
In much of the Great Basin region and the desert west you have fairly limited migration, so if you find bucks when they're in the red in May and June, they'll still be in that same general vicinity later in the year. When they do move, it's typically a bit further uphill to escape some of the heat, or to follow the melting snow-line as food emerges in the higher altitudes. Patterning the bucks consistently across the summer eases you into them getting harder to spot as their coats change, and gives you an idea where each buck lives. By doing this, you're far more likely to know if they've truly "disappeared" to a new location, or if they're almost certainly still in the place they've always been, but are just a little harder to spot or a little cagier than earlier in the month.
Between that first trip and opening day, I try to find one primary buck and my backup buck, over the course of about 5-8 scouting trips. It may be one or two days at a time in the beginning, but I try to use the process to build up physical and mental stamina as well, and may very well have my last scouting trip be 4 days or more, depending on how dialed in I am on the zone and the bucks I want to hunt.
There's a lot of good info out there on glassing, and I've shared very little of it here - what I have shared will make your glassing far, far more efficient. Run a search for articles here on Rokslide on glassing, and find some YouTube videos on it for more detail - Cliff Grey has some good stuff on glassing, IIRC. Oh, and buy Robby Denning's books. If you really want to study and learn, his books are packed with exceptional info.
