As always, best of luck to you on your draws this year... hopefully in your research and in developing your strategy for application this year you have found some value in the tools and information available on our blog. Remember to subscribe by entering your email in the box on the right sidebar to stay up to speed on the adventures of The Glassing Tree friends.
In your research for the 2019 Utah big game application period, there is a lot of great information available here on The Glassing Tree - Utah Big Game Odds site:
Check out the Tips for Increasing Your Drawing Odds page and the Drawing Analysis page with a bunch of information about each of the limited entry and once-in-a-lifetime species.
Also check out a series that we posted prior to the 2018 application cycle on the topic of "Point Creep":
Part #1: Point Creep?
Part #2: Variable #1 - Tag Allocation
Part #3: Variable #2 - The "Point Buyer"
Part #4: Variable #3 - The "Unit Jumper"
Part #5: Variable #4 - The "Inactive Applicant"
Part #6: Wrap Up - A Real Life Understanding
To get the optimism and excitement going take a few minutes to relive a handful of the Utah limited entry hunts that we've drawn in the past several years (for the complete write ups visit the Hunt Stories page):
2010 Book Cliffs Limited Entry Deer
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. Cody would stop occasionally to ask me what we should do & I’d tell him to either 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.” 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 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 dark chocolate brown antlers!
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 Jeremy in the RV and Cody 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 bound through the clearing to my left then across the road in front of us. This was the nicest buck we’d seen so far. But he was running hard and in my hunting experience I thought that 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. I waited for a couple seconds with my view of Cody now 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 6+ months was over. 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.
2014 Central Mountains, Manti Limited Entry Elk
We got camp set up and waited for my dad & Darren to arrive. That afternoon the bulls began bugling all around us, from the timber on both the east and west. At about 6pm I was able to spot a bull & his eight or nine cows on the east hillside. He stayed put for several minutes and Grandpa got a good look at him. He was a bull that Grandpa would be more than happy to take home with him. It set our bar pretty high...
Sunday was adventure day. We started out driving the roads again but Darren noticed that the rear passenger tire on the truck had gone flat. Luckily we had a full size spare, but since camp is 15 miles or so from paved road we decided to head into town to try and get the tire fixed. Unfortunately the only open establishment we could find was an AutoZone so we plugged the tire ourselves and hoped for the best. On our way back up to the top we were cruising along the highway and spotted a small bull just off the road. It was absolute chaos as we screeched to a stop. All of our gear that was in the cab ended up on the floor and Grandpa and I were trying as quickly as we could to get out. Just behind the smaller bull was a little bit nicer one. He looked like a good sized 5x5 and Grandpa was running down the middle of the highway working a round into his gun. I’m grateful that there were no cars behind us & no cars passed us as I ran down the middle of the highway next to him. The bulls crossed the road and ran parallel to a big snow drift fence with no real shot ever presented. We piled back into the truck and tried to gather up all our gear & I couldn’t find my phone. So we drove back to where I got out and looked for my phone. I couldn’t see it anywhere in the road so Grandpa started looking around in the truck. He ended up finding it way up under his seat, which was crazy because he was in the front passenger seat and I was in the rear driver’s side seat.
We again spent the evening glassing the hillside across from camp. My dad spotted a really nice 6x6 bull about 650 yards up the hill and we tried to get Grandpa on him. He had gone just north of camp to sit for the evening and that change in angle was just enough that Grandpa couldn’t see it. I bugled at the bull and he stopped and stood in one spot like a statue for at least 15 minutes! I ran over to Grandpa to try and show him where the bull was, and all I could see was the right antler and right ear behind an aspen. We never could get a clear view for a shot. Grandpa cow called and I bugled at him for a couple minutes but he never moved. Then, he took a couple steps and was completely gone from our view. We stopped paying too much attention to this bull though because with all the ruckus that we had made another bull had dropped all the way to the bottom of the canyon and was coming towards us aggressively answering my bugles. He sounded like he was going to pop out at the end of the clearing at any moment. We could hear him stomping on the ground & raking trees between bugles. We decided to get a little bit more aggressive and Grandpa grabbed a tree branch and starting raking the nearby trees with it. Then the next time he bugled I decided to cut him off and I started to bugle before he was done. This seemed to really tick him off and his bugles changed getting very low and growly. I really think we could have had a shot at this bull had we not made a tactical error. This bull was coming in from the same direction that I had just come to meet up with Grandpa and he hit my scent. As soon as he hit my scent it was like he was shot out of a cannon and he wheeled around and headed back to his hiding place as quickly as possible. I had never been successful at bringing a bull in while calling and this was an intense 40 minute back and forth as he gradually got closer and closer… and more and more agitated! My only regret is that we hunkered down and tried to bring the bull into us, I think that if we had worked closer to him ourselves that we may have at least gotten sight of him.
2018 Late Muzzleloader Limited Entry Deer
After lunch the wind had shifted so we decided to revisit our morning plan and work our way south into a large bowl that always seems to have game. As soon as we began dropping into the bowl I spotted a small group of deer down in the bottom. We sat and glassed a cluster of trees in the bottom for several minutes and spotted a couple deer working in and out of the trees. Cody decided that it was time to take matters into his own hands and be the aggressor. The wind was actually quite perfect for a stalk so he got the wind in his face and slowly made his way towards the trees while sat and watched from about 600 yards away.
I lost his location as he neared the clump of trees and thought that the deer must have made their way out of there unnoticed earlier. Movement caught my eye as a doe burst from the trees… followed by another… then another. There were deer coming out of the trees everywhere, more than I anticipated. I scanned the deer searching for anything with antlers and didn’t see anything. Then in the bottom left of the field of view of my binos I saw something different. I noticed a large set of antlers protruding from the head of the last deer to emerge from the trees and almost as soon as I spotted him I was startled by the report of a muzzleloader. The buck ran a short distance and then slowly started working his way up a small fold in the bowl. A second muzzleloader blast caught me off guard and I just happened to be watching the buck at the time of the shot. The buck appeared to jump and quickly made his way to the top of a small clearing in the shade and stood motionless for several minutes. I thought that he was hit but the way that he was acting it wasn’t a very good hit.
Cody slowly emerged from the trees and was glassing the area in front of him. I couldn’t tell if he could see the buck or not, so after several minutes I left my perch and hustled down to meet up with him and let him know where the buck was. As I was nearing Cody’s location he started waiving frantically at me and I was waiving frantically back at him. Cody had seen the buck bed down and didn’t want me to spook it by coming in noisily while I was wanting to let him know to slow down because we really didn’t want to be pushing what I had thought was a poorly hit buck.
Once we realized we were on the same page he let me know that both shots were actually misses and the buck was currently unharmed. While Cody and I were planning our next move we watched as 14 does that had scattered from the trees made their way back to where the buck was now bedded and just milled around him. I had never seen that before, this buck was the boss of that little group… the does actually came back to him!
We worked our way to within shooting range again but the buck was bedded with a number of does very near him so there really wasn’t much of a shot opportunity with the only part of his body visible being his face and antlers. So we waited… but Cody lost patience and took what was likely an ill-advised shot on a bedded buck with very little margin for error. After the smoke cleared the deer were gone so we began scanning the area where he was bedded and caught glimpses of deer scurrying through the trees in various directions. We scanned deer to the left and all were does, then some more movement caught our attention up and to the right of where they were bedded. The lead deer in this group was the buck so Cody readied his rifle. As the buck stepped into a small clearing in the trees he stopped, turned and looked back at the handful of does trailing him as if to tell them to hurry it up, and gave Cody just the half second he needed. The rifle barked, I watched the buck react to the impact, and then begin rolling down the hill.
The buck died half buried under a log and some brush, so we untangled him and were pleasantly surprised and very pleased with the caliber of buck that was laying on the ground in front of us.
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