When my oldest son turned 12, I started collecting points for Wyoming and Colorado in hopes of providing a quality out west hunting experience for him. We honed his hunting skills in the Midwest on whitetails with the bow and gun while he grew stronger and bigger. This year, he turned 16 and I felt it was time to use some of the points to cash in on a few tags and try to get him out west. After much research, I found what I thought was a good chance of drawing some limited-entry tags with our modest points. I was more interested in having a quality experience than a foot race with headlamps on in the morning to get to a good spot. The size of the animals was less important to me than the opportunity to see a lot of animals. Wyoming did not disappoint.
We packed up the truck and left on Friday from Wisconsin, heading for Wyoming. We made it to the last town before our destination well after dark on Saturday evening and opted for a motel and dinner. After a good night’s rest and a quick breakfast, we had a short drive into the hills we had scouted in August to begin our hunt. We were into deer and antelope right away on our first hike. Wyatt passed up a 3x3 mule deer and an antelope within the first hour of the hunt. We were there for the whole week and had seen some good animals while scouting in August, so we didn’t want to fill our tags too quickly. We hunted in the rain until late morning and figured we had covered this hill pretty well. We saw quite a few animals, just nothing to try for on opening morning. We had hiked about five miles and were pretty wet when got back to the truck. We headed up the road further after a snack and warming up.
The road had become greasy, and we had gone only a few miles when a man came running out to the road to flag us down. After a quick hello and a visual inspection of a truck that had slid into the wheel ruts of a two-track, we were cleaning out the backseat to haul the man and his wife into town in search of a tow truck. We dropped the couple at the tow truck garage and wished them luck. After the slow slide back to town, we decided to hunt a little lower elevation and stick closer to pavement until the rain stopped.
We hunted the rest of the day, and it rained off and on. We got to look at about 25 bucks total between the mule deer and antelope, and it felt like we had a better feel for the size of the animals in the area. Late in the day, Wyatt got his first chance to actually look at an antelope through the riflescope, but that buck wasn’t interested in sticking around long enough to get shot.
The next morning, the rain had really gotten strong, so we stayed in the motel until well after sunup to catch up on some rest. Everything dried out in the motel overnight, and we were back into the truck and staying on the good roads for sure today. The rain had turned to snow up high, and we could see the area we were in opening morning was completely white. We never were able to get back into where we had started.
Late on the second day, we found some mule deer bucks in the sage and decided to make a stalk. Splashing through the mud and about 40 cows around us made the deer detect us pretty easily. Luckily, they only moved off about 200 yards and stopped to look at us. Wyatt was able to set up on the shooting sticks and take his first mule deer buck at 190 yards. We had to claw our way up a muddy knife ridge to get to the buck and drag it back down to where we could work on him. It was now nearly dark, so we decided to go get the pack frames and come back for the buck with the proper tools.
It was much nicer in the morning. The deer was untouched, right where we had left him. We hustled him out of there on the game cart so we could work on him close to the truck.
With the deer on ice, we kept looking for an antelope for Wyatt. About mid-afternoon, we found some in a walk-in area that joined BLM. We made a move on them and caught the buck peeking through the grass at us at 250 yards. I stayed put while Wyatt moved to the side about 20 yards up a slight hill where he could gain some elevation above the grass, and he made a great 250-yard heart shot. We got the antelope pictured, on the game cart, and taken care of on ice. It was now Dad’s turn to try to shoot something.
We set up in a sage flat where we had seen deer the previous evening moving from public down to private land to feed. We were only set up for a few minutes when the first does came over the distant ridge. They eventually moved right down in front of us. One small buck was all we saw that evening, and he didn’t offer much more than a glimpse.
Day four found us back in search of animals in a foggy morning with a good, heavy freeze to make the muddy roads a little more solid, at least until the sun came out. We hunted for about an hour before we saw a few bucks in a draw. Closer inspection with the binoculars revealed the two medium-sized bucks had an older, bigger friend already bedded behind a sage clump in the same draw. They busted out just as we were stalking in for a shot. They went up the draw, but we could see that it topped out only a few hundred yards ahead of them, so we went up the draw to the left of them in hopes that we could get close enough to them when they topped out in the open. We snuck about 600 yards up our draw before catching our breath and peeking over the top. They were in the open about 130 yards away, and Wyatt let me know the big buck was in the lead. After two warning shots through the grass, I moved up the hill a few yards to get a better angle above the grass. The big buck dropped at the shot on the third try. Buck fever still gets me.
This was a pretty good buck by our standards. He had five points on each side but was not symmetrical with one side having a fork and the other not. After some pictures and a short drag into a shaded ditch, we retrieved the packs, saw, and game bags and put the buck in the cooler with the other animals. At this point, I got to thinking we had better check into a processor for the animals because we had a lot of meat that would take me a week to cut up once we got home, and I knew that would be rough. After a quick phone call to a number from the grocery store corkboard, we had dropped off all three animals and lightened the back of the truck considerably. We only had an antelope to find and then all of our tags would be filled.
After a lunch from the back of the truck and a quick cape out of the mule deer we had just harvested, we were back to hunting mode. It didn’t take long to find an antelope buck alone up a valley and another stalk was on. This time, we took the long way around to get downwind and crept up to peek over the hill. Wyatt ranged the buck at 330 yards, and he was feeding towards us. After a quick back out and reposition, I was set up on my shooting sticks with a 299-yard broadside shot. The buck moved forward a few steps at the shot, back a few steps, and then flipped over backwards and disappeared in the sage. One more game cart rendezvous and then we had him on the truck. After a quick trip to the processor to drop this animal off, we were all done with the hunt, except for cleaning up a little mud!
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