Idaho Unit 40 muleys (long w/ pics)
GPWDeer
11/20/07 9:37pm
As most of you know, my friend Kenneth and I and his dad (Ron) all put in together and drew the unit 40 late buck hunt in SW Idaho. We tagged out on Saturday evening.
After eight days of hunting in the rain with the weather never really pushing the bucks in to the peak of the rut, we had seen some real nice bucks, but nothing like what we had seen during our summer scouting trips.
We hunted above the timber the first day and didn't see a deer, so we dropped down to a lower elevation the next day and saw a few deer, including a nice 4x4 which was probably 24 inches wide and real heavy. We opted to wait to see what the rest of the week would bring.
On day three, Ron couldn't get the itch off his trigger finger and ended up shooting a spindly 3x4 which would be a decent deer in a general season hunt, but left something to be desired by all of us including him after the barrel cooled off. Ron DID put on a very impressive stalk which my dad and I watched from the car through the spotting scope. At one point he was on one side of a bush and the deer was on the other side scraping the tree with his antlers. He was literally 10 feet from the deer. Evidently he got so intimate with the deer during the course of that tree dance that he couldn’t let the deer walk away. Here is a video showing the deer in relation to Ron. Ron is hard to see, but he is the guy in the center with full camo except for his black hat. (video coming soon)
We hunted very hard for the rest of the week and saw at least one nice 4 pt every day. We videoed and photographed a couple bruisers, but it was still too early to shoot something that wasn't a toad.
As the week went on we started to see people filling their tags with forked horns (on day 2 of the hunt) and three points (on day 4). Having seen so many quality bucks it seemed ridiculous that someone would waste their tag, but it just shows that not everyone thinks alike. We also talked to a lot of ranchers and even a game officer who said that they had not seen anyone take anything larger than a 25” buck out of that area this year. I just seemed like we were going to find one of those bruisers I filmed earlier in the summer.
We decided that due to rain and muddy conditions of the road in the area where we had camped that we would break camp on Saturday and head out Saturday evening. I had intentions to hold out and see if the weather would cooperate the following week and come back on Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving (against the wife's wishes of course). Kenneth would not be back and was hoping to fill his tag Saturday. He might be able to come up the next Saturday for a short hunt, but more than likely his hunt was over if he didn't shoot something on Saturday. His dad, having filled his tag earlier in the week, pulled out and headed for town with the horses around Saturday morning.
Saturday morning we left camp early and rode the ATV (which we had not done at all during the hunt, but we were tired of walking and wanted to cover some territory). We rode about 1 mile off the main road and we started to see groups of does here and there as we rode. Then a group of about 8 does and 2 large bucks jumped across the trail in front of us. We did our best to quickly dismount and get our rifles ready for the shot, but the deer were too far gone. We tracked them for a little way and Kenneth got a low percentage, freestanding, parting shot at one of the bucks. He missed as the deer bounded off.
Disgusted, we drove farther down the trail to investigate a draw we had glassed from a distance. About an hour later we returned and tracked the deer we had seen earlier. To our amazement, they didn't go more than half a mile from where my friend had shot at them.
I spotted the deer moving across the face of the hill across the draw and brought my binos up to have a look...doe...doe...doe...HOLY CRAP! There was a good buck following them which may or may not have been one of the two bucks we had briefly seen earlier. I sat down quickly and braced myself for the approximately 400 yard shot with my 7mm. I am comfortable at that distance, but I in the heat of the moment I misjudged the distance to closer than it was and shot under the buck (I found where the bullet impacted the dirt right between the bucks tracks slightly up the hill). The buck took off. We looked for blood for about 45 minutes before we discovered the impact in the wet dirt. We were both kicking ourselves the whole way back to the ATV for missing and even more, for taking the shots that we probably shouldn’t have. We headed back to camp to help my dad pack the camper and pull it out of the mud hole we had called camp for the week.
After we ate some lunch and pulled out the trailer we decided to put one more hunt on in the afternoon. The deer had not seemed to be too bothered by the shooting earlier in the day so we thought they might give us another opportunity. My dad, Kenneth and I returned to the spot where we thought the deer might have headed. We started hiking up a small rise in the center of a large draw when an ATV cruised up the road past our vehicles. Just then my friend spotted a doe walking on the hill in front of us and then he said, "oh wait…I see the buck! He's not the biggest one of the group, but he's right there looking at us". I glassed the buck who was looking at the ATV as it drove up the road and determined that he was a “shooter” for anyone on the last day of the hunt. Kenneth decided that he was going to take the deer. The only thing we could see of the buck was his white face, his antlers and about 4 inches of his neck below his chin. At 150 yards my friend knelt down and breathed a deep breath in and then out. I watched in the binoculars as he fired a single round. The deer who had turned his head away from us disappeared out of the small window between the trees. We waited a few minutes and we watched a doe or two filed out of the brush and over the top of the small hill. The buck never showed up, so we headed up the hill to see if we could find blood (by this point we are both wondering if we need to go sight our rifles in again…). We got to where the deer had been standing and both of our hearts sank as we looked for blood and didn’t see any.
Then, I saw it. There was a single drop of blood on a leaf. Another spot of blood was found about 6 feet away…and then there it was… a large pool of blood about two feet long and we knew he was hit hard. Seconds later I spotted the buck laying under a tree, completely bled out from the exit wound in his throat.
A few high fives and congratulations were exchanged and we remembered that there was still a larger deer with that group so we lowered our voices and took a few pictures. We dressed the deer out and loaded it on the ATV and hid the ATV in some brush.
After our earlier success at tracking the deer we decided to head directly to where we had last seen the deer and then follow their tracks until we got into the deer. It was less than 10 minutes of slow sneaking when I spotted a deer feeding on the ridge about 800 or 900 yards away. We started moving that direction and we were moving directly into the sun which meant that we had to use the juniper bushes as shades when possible and move slowly through the open spaces in order to remain undetected. As we worked closer I spotted another group of deer across a very steep and narrow canyon below us. They too were feeding and unconcerned about their surroundings. We continued to move in closer and lower into the canyon. As we rounded a corner in the trail I saw a large bodied deer about 400 yards across the canyon and below us in the shadow of the hill. A quick check through my binoculars verified that this was the larger deer that we had seen earlier in the morning.
Kenneth and my dad were following closely and spotted him almost at the same time I did. Everyone was instantly silent and no one moved. I knew I could not make this shot without a rest so I inched forward to a rock in front of me and sat down very slowly. As I shouldered my rifle the large 4x4 looked our direction. I fired and the deer didn’t move. Again I thought, “What is going on?” To my dismay, the deer started to run up the hill and through the rimrock. I chambered another round and took aim. As I squeezed the trigger, the crosshairs were perfectly aligned with his shoulder. It was a hit. The buck went another 30 yards up the hill and then rolled backwards down until he came to rest under a large juniper. We all watched with baited breath to see if he would get back up. After a few moments it was apparent that he was down for the count and Kenneth and I headed across the draw as my dad watched to make sure he didn’t get back up. As I approached the buck I was elated. He was a true Idaho trophy. His perfectly symmetrical typical main frame was thick and dark. He was not the non-typical 30” buck I had envisioned bringing home all summer long in my dreams, but he will definitely be going on my wall!
It was getting dark fast. Kenneth had killed his deer at about 2:00 and I shot mine at around 4:30. We hurried to take the pictures and then dressed the deer out and headed back to the vehicle. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to get the buck out of the hole he was in until morning, so we set up a temporary camp with the trailer attached to the suburban and went back after him first thing in the morning on Sunday. Boy did we all sleep good that night.
We were able to get a lot closer with the ATV than we thought and only had to drag the buck about 100 yards down hill. We had him loaded by 9:20 am and were on the road out of there.
Thank you to my wife for letting me be gone from her and our son for so long. Thanks to my dad for sticking with us even though he decided not to put in with us for this hunt (bad decision on his part). It was a very good time for all of us and the memories will last forever.
Here is Kenneth’s buck.
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Here is my buck.
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and me and my dad with my buck.
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Here is a picture of all of our bucks.
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Here is picture of a buck I passed up on day four. I was able to stalk within 100 yards of this buck and if he would have had a back fork on his left side AND had that cheater, I would have shot him, but because he was a main frame 3x4 with a cheater I passed. We did go back twice later in the week to try and locate him with no success. (taken through the spotting scope)
Here is a video of this buck running off a smaller 4x4 as well (through the spotting scope). [video coming soon, sorry]
So, now I have an issue. I think my cape might be spoiling. I shot the buck on Saturday. There is a little blood and meat on the inside of the cape where the bullet exited through the front of his neck. It has been fairly cool, but the cape is starting to smell slightly sour. I am going to try and get the cape to a taxidermist tomorrow. If I can't should I freeze the whole thing (I haven't caped out the head yet so the horns and head and a little bit of the neck are all still attached because I have no idea what I am doing). I have been quoted $600-700 from a couple taxidermists and I think that is really high for a shoulder mount. What is your experience? This is my first one.
Sorry this post was so long.
After eight days of hunting in the rain with the weather never really pushing the bucks in to the peak of the rut, we had seen some real nice bucks, but nothing like what we had seen during our summer scouting trips.
We hunted above the timber the first day and didn't see a deer, so we dropped down to a lower elevation the next day and saw a few deer, including a nice 4x4 which was probably 24 inches wide and real heavy. We opted to wait to see what the rest of the week would bring.
On day three, Ron couldn't get the itch off his trigger finger and ended up shooting a spindly 3x4 which would be a decent deer in a general season hunt, but left something to be desired by all of us including him after the barrel cooled off. Ron DID put on a very impressive stalk which my dad and I watched from the car through the spotting scope. At one point he was on one side of a bush and the deer was on the other side scraping the tree with his antlers. He was literally 10 feet from the deer. Evidently he got so intimate with the deer during the course of that tree dance that he couldn’t let the deer walk away. Here is a video showing the deer in relation to Ron. Ron is hard to see, but he is the guy in the center with full camo except for his black hat. (video coming soon)
We hunted very hard for the rest of the week and saw at least one nice 4 pt every day. We videoed and photographed a couple bruisers, but it was still too early to shoot something that wasn't a toad.
As the week went on we started to see people filling their tags with forked horns (on day 2 of the hunt) and three points (on day 4). Having seen so many quality bucks it seemed ridiculous that someone would waste their tag, but it just shows that not everyone thinks alike. We also talked to a lot of ranchers and even a game officer who said that they had not seen anyone take anything larger than a 25” buck out of that area this year. I just seemed like we were going to find one of those bruisers I filmed earlier in the summer.
We decided that due to rain and muddy conditions of the road in the area where we had camped that we would break camp on Saturday and head out Saturday evening. I had intentions to hold out and see if the weather would cooperate the following week and come back on Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving (against the wife's wishes of course). Kenneth would not be back and was hoping to fill his tag Saturday. He might be able to come up the next Saturday for a short hunt, but more than likely his hunt was over if he didn't shoot something on Saturday. His dad, having filled his tag earlier in the week, pulled out and headed for town with the horses around Saturday morning.
Saturday morning we left camp early and rode the ATV (which we had not done at all during the hunt, but we were tired of walking and wanted to cover some territory). We rode about 1 mile off the main road and we started to see groups of does here and there as we rode. Then a group of about 8 does and 2 large bucks jumped across the trail in front of us. We did our best to quickly dismount and get our rifles ready for the shot, but the deer were too far gone. We tracked them for a little way and Kenneth got a low percentage, freestanding, parting shot at one of the bucks. He missed as the deer bounded off.
Disgusted, we drove farther down the trail to investigate a draw we had glassed from a distance. About an hour later we returned and tracked the deer we had seen earlier. To our amazement, they didn't go more than half a mile from where my friend had shot at them.
I spotted the deer moving across the face of the hill across the draw and brought my binos up to have a look...doe...doe...doe...HOLY CRAP! There was a good buck following them which may or may not have been one of the two bucks we had briefly seen earlier. I sat down quickly and braced myself for the approximately 400 yard shot with my 7mm. I am comfortable at that distance, but I in the heat of the moment I misjudged the distance to closer than it was and shot under the buck (I found where the bullet impacted the dirt right between the bucks tracks slightly up the hill). The buck took off. We looked for blood for about 45 minutes before we discovered the impact in the wet dirt. We were both kicking ourselves the whole way back to the ATV for missing and even more, for taking the shots that we probably shouldn’t have. We headed back to camp to help my dad pack the camper and pull it out of the mud hole we had called camp for the week.
After we ate some lunch and pulled out the trailer we decided to put one more hunt on in the afternoon. The deer had not seemed to be too bothered by the shooting earlier in the day so we thought they might give us another opportunity. My dad, Kenneth and I returned to the spot where we thought the deer might have headed. We started hiking up a small rise in the center of a large draw when an ATV cruised up the road past our vehicles. Just then my friend spotted a doe walking on the hill in front of us and then he said, "oh wait…I see the buck! He's not the biggest one of the group, but he's right there looking at us". I glassed the buck who was looking at the ATV as it drove up the road and determined that he was a “shooter” for anyone on the last day of the hunt. Kenneth decided that he was going to take the deer. The only thing we could see of the buck was his white face, his antlers and about 4 inches of his neck below his chin. At 150 yards my friend knelt down and breathed a deep breath in and then out. I watched in the binoculars as he fired a single round. The deer who had turned his head away from us disappeared out of the small window between the trees. We waited a few minutes and we watched a doe or two filed out of the brush and over the top of the small hill. The buck never showed up, so we headed up the hill to see if we could find blood (by this point we are both wondering if we need to go sight our rifles in again…). We got to where the deer had been standing and both of our hearts sank as we looked for blood and didn’t see any.
Then, I saw it. There was a single drop of blood on a leaf. Another spot of blood was found about 6 feet away…and then there it was… a large pool of blood about two feet long and we knew he was hit hard. Seconds later I spotted the buck laying under a tree, completely bled out from the exit wound in his throat.
A few high fives and congratulations were exchanged and we remembered that there was still a larger deer with that group so we lowered our voices and took a few pictures. We dressed the deer out and loaded it on the ATV and hid the ATV in some brush.
After our earlier success at tracking the deer we decided to head directly to where we had last seen the deer and then follow their tracks until we got into the deer. It was less than 10 minutes of slow sneaking when I spotted a deer feeding on the ridge about 800 or 900 yards away. We started moving that direction and we were moving directly into the sun which meant that we had to use the juniper bushes as shades when possible and move slowly through the open spaces in order to remain undetected. As we worked closer I spotted another group of deer across a very steep and narrow canyon below us. They too were feeding and unconcerned about their surroundings. We continued to move in closer and lower into the canyon. As we rounded a corner in the trail I saw a large bodied deer about 400 yards across the canyon and below us in the shadow of the hill. A quick check through my binoculars verified that this was the larger deer that we had seen earlier in the morning.
Kenneth and my dad were following closely and spotted him almost at the same time I did. Everyone was instantly silent and no one moved. I knew I could not make this shot without a rest so I inched forward to a rock in front of me and sat down very slowly. As I shouldered my rifle the large 4x4 looked our direction. I fired and the deer didn’t move. Again I thought, “What is going on?” To my dismay, the deer started to run up the hill and through the rimrock. I chambered another round and took aim. As I squeezed the trigger, the crosshairs were perfectly aligned with his shoulder. It was a hit. The buck went another 30 yards up the hill and then rolled backwards down until he came to rest under a large juniper. We all watched with baited breath to see if he would get back up. After a few moments it was apparent that he was down for the count and Kenneth and I headed across the draw as my dad watched to make sure he didn’t get back up. As I approached the buck I was elated. He was a true Idaho trophy. His perfectly symmetrical typical main frame was thick and dark. He was not the non-typical 30” buck I had envisioned bringing home all summer long in my dreams, but he will definitely be going on my wall!
It was getting dark fast. Kenneth had killed his deer at about 2:00 and I shot mine at around 4:30. We hurried to take the pictures and then dressed the deer out and headed back to the vehicle. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to get the buck out of the hole he was in until morning, so we set up a temporary camp with the trailer attached to the suburban and went back after him first thing in the morning on Sunday. Boy did we all sleep good that night.
We were able to get a lot closer with the ATV than we thought and only had to drag the buck about 100 yards down hill. We had him loaded by 9:20 am and were on the road out of there.
Thank you to my wife for letting me be gone from her and our son for so long. Thanks to my dad for sticking with us even though he decided not to put in with us for this hunt (bad decision on his part). It was a very good time for all of us and the memories will last forever.
Here is Kenneth’s buck.
Here is my buck.
and me and my dad with my buck.
Here is a picture of all of our bucks.
Here is picture of a buck I passed up on day four. I was able to stalk within 100 yards of this buck and if he would have had a back fork on his left side AND had that cheater, I would have shot him, but because he was a main frame 3x4 with a cheater I passed. We did go back twice later in the week to try and locate him with no success. (taken through the spotting scope)
Here is a video of this buck running off a smaller 4x4 as well (through the spotting scope). [video coming soon, sorry]
So, now I have an issue. I think my cape might be spoiling. I shot the buck on Saturday. There is a little blood and meat on the inside of the cape where the bullet exited through the front of his neck. It has been fairly cool, but the cape is starting to smell slightly sour. I am going to try and get the cape to a taxidermist tomorrow. If I can't should I freeze the whole thing (I haven't caped out the head yet so the horns and head and a little bit of the neck are all still attached because I have no idea what I am doing). I have been quoted $600-700 from a couple taxidermists and I think that is really high for a shoulder mount. What is your experience? This is my first one.
Sorry this post was so long.
11,404
Kenneth's cape has two big holes in the neck from where he shot it. I don't think I would want it, but that is a good idea, I will look into it.
I don't know how to tell if the hair is slipping. Do you think freezing it is a good plan? At least to buy me a couple days (with thanksgiving being tomorrow nobody is working)?
GPWDeer
Your buck is great in my opinion. I love the classic 4x4 frame, nice deep forks, and he looks to be pretty symetrical to boot!
CONGRATS again my friend!
I'd mount him also.
I'm paying $650.00 for a shoulder mount in So. Utah, but this is likely a high end price.
Thanks for sharing and CONGRATS!! :thumb :thumb
ANY GUESSES ON WHAT IT WILL SCORE? I have my own ideas, but I will have the Taxi tell me what he scores it at this weekend when I go meet with him to determine the position I want the buck mounted in.
Any suggestions on what you think would be a good looking mount position? I am thinking a sneak with ears cocked and head turned slightly to the deer's left. I like that it would not be as tall in the sneak position since I don't have very high ceilings.
GPWDeer
I am interested to hear what you guys guess. I will let you know this weekend.
Nice deer and great story!