2010 Book Cliffs - Any Weapon

[derekp1999]

Hey guys, I really enjoy reading the stories… so I thought I’d share mine. It’s more about the build up to opening day because let’s just say the actual pulling of the trigger was rather anticlimactic. It really wasn’t what we were expecting from a hunt on the Book Cliffs… but I hope you find it at least entertaining.
Last spring I got a phone call from a friend with what he declared to be “huge news.” He told me a certified letter arrived that day & he’d drawn a Book Cliffs any weapon deer tag for 2010 from his unfilled ’09 Dedicated Hunter tag. He was excited & asked if I’d help out. Um, duh… stupid question, I sure would (to the dismay of my wife).
Through the summer, neither of us could find time to scout between family & work (we both had additions to our families in the summer making things really tough). He made one trip shortly after archery season & saw a handful of good bucks. During that trip he was sitting on the tailgate of his truck just after dark grilling hot dogs when a black bear decided to join him for dinner. It was a long uneasy night’s sleep for him in the bed of the pickup & decided that he’d rent an RV for the hunt. So we had to rely heavily on info that we got from the Northeastern DWR branch.
We headed out from Layton on Thursday morning, picked up another guy in Heber, and arrived in camp at the top of Rector Ridge about 3pm. We unloaded the ATVs & headed out to take advantage of the last few hours of light. We saw a small herd of elk with some really good bulls and three small bucks on Indian Springs Ridge. Nothing to get excited about & I was a little concerned... I had read several forum posts saying we should expect see 35-50 bucks per day & it would be a matter of finding “the best one.” Since we hadn’t seen any good numbers of deer we saddled up the ATVs Friday & put 120 miles on them riding from Rabbit Mountain to Indian Springs Ridge (and everywhere in between). We saw about 30 deer and ZERO shooter bucks, the biggest being a two year old 3x3. We did run across a very nice bull elk on Rector Ridge, a beautifully symmetrical and wide 5x5 (I am a sucker for symmetry), but we weren’t hunting elk now were we!
Here are a couple of the little bucks we ran across Thursday & Friday.

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Friday night we formulated a pretty weak game plan for opening morning based on what we’d seen (or better yet hadn’t seen) & lay in our beds listening to the National Weather Service warnings for the storm that would roll in the next day. I had been saying since noon Friday that we needed to get lower in elevation OR get off the ATVs and put down some boot leather, pushing harder for getting lower because of the impending weather. The DWR info we got hinted that deer would be starting to migrate, so we would be wise to find “transitional habitat” and we would know when we found it because deer would be everywhere. We had been spending most our time at elevations of 7200 to 8000 feet… let’s just say the deer WERE NOT everywhere! We rode some of the familiar roads opening morning and didn’t see any bucks. He’d stop occasionally to ask me what we should do & I’d tell him every time to get lower or get off the ATVs. But we would continue on our current path. After a frustrating morning we headed back for a snack & regroup. He looked at me and said “we should get lower,” like it was his idea… thanks for listening. I was getting sick & tired of riding those darn ATVs. We chose a route through some lower sagebrush & juniper and headed out. As soon as my GPS read 6600 feet in elevation we started seeing deer… lots of them, herds of 8-15 does at a time every couple hundred yards. We saw more deer in 500 yards than we had in a full day and half, it was only a matter of time before we saw some bucks. We came across a couple old guys that said they’d seen some good bucks in the area & passed on them, but a camp down the road had shot a really nice 4x4 that morning. When we drove past the camp “nice” was an understatement… deeply forked, wide, perfectly symmetrical, and chocolate antlered! Wow.
Talk about a shot of optimism. We decided to loop back & move camp. Mostly because we were seeing deer, but we were also nervous about having a rental RV at an elevation where the forecasts were projecting several inches of snow overnight.
We trailered one ATV & I took up the rear in the pickup, following the RV with the hunter leading the way on ATV. A couple miles down the road, after seeing a handful of does, we spotted a good buck. I watched him beeline through the clearing to my left then across the road in front of us & could tell he was the nicest buck we’d seen so far even through the dust behind the RV. But in my hunting experience I thought that by the way it was running there was no way he was going to stop for a decent shot. I stopped behind the RV and saw the ATV angle off to the left… riderless, waited for a couple seconds (my view of my friend was blocked by the RV) and heard him fire. Out of the corner of my eye to the right, through a tiny opening in the brush I saw the buck drop. It’d stopped 30 yards off the road for a perfect broadside shot. We bailed out of the vehicles and the hooting, hollering, high fiving, and back slapping started. Followed by the realization that it was 1:30 in the afternoon on opening day and the hunt that had built up expectations & excitement over the course of 7-8 months… was over. We really didn’t know how big the buck was, just that it was the biggest we’d seen yet. That wasn’t how we pictured it would go down at all, no spot ‘n stalk, no glassing, no passing up good bucks with hopes of a bigger one… just jump off the ATV and BLAM!!! Done. I retrieved the ATV & helped get the buck cleaned up. With pics taken, we got loaded up as the storm started to roll in. Since we had camp all packed up we decided to try to beat the storm down the mountain. We spent the night on the banks of the Green River just outside Vernal, cutting two hours off our drive home Sunday.
This was my first experience with a limited entry deer hunt. It didn’t work out like the dream hunt we were all anticipating, expecting to glass good bucks each day & choose which one we wanted. But with a good buck hanging on opening day we couldn’t complain. I’m certain that with a little more time we could have found something bigger and seen many more deer, but this is the biggest buck to date for him (and the biggest I’ve personally had a part in) so all involved are thrilled. We figure he’s a young buck, probably 3.5 years old & scores 130-ish (I measured him incorrectly initially – thanks to BOHNTR and others for another thread on this forum explaining how to measure. When he gets the head back we’ll put the tape to him again… correctly). All things considered it was a tag that he didn’t even put in for, fell bass ackwards into it with his unfilled Dedicated Hunter tag (first year even!), then shot it right off the side of the road. If I could only be as fortunate next year!

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[Jeff]

Nice, I drew out in 02 and 08 for the Books, Love it.

[sneekeepete]

Congrats to all involved and thanks for the story.

[derekp1999]

Got the mount back the other day. Sure is an interesting buck, I like the triangular shape of his antlers.

Here's another buck that another friend took during the General Archery hunt.

As you can see I have friends that are quite successful... I can't wait until it's my turn to take a nice buck!

[firefighterbraun]

Good looking mount! Congrats to your friend. And that is a little different with how the antlers kinda angle up instead of going out flat like most.

[dahlmer]

Fun story. Congrats to your buddy on a nice buck. Some friends and I hunted the Books in 03 and 04. Probably some the of the funnest hunts I have ever been on.

[MuleyMadness]

Not sure how I missed this thread, but I seemed to have. Great job and thanks for sharing. Nice looking bucks.

[NotEnufTags]

Congrats. I'd like to hunt the book cliffs at some point.

[huntfishnv]

Sounds like you had a great hunt, looks like the mount came out good to!