First buck down.
We arrived to the area we were going to hunt by noon on Friday. Box Elder is an immense extension of land, so we e-scouted and decided to go with a particular region. After setting camp we went out and scouted 5 canyons. In all of them we found quaking aspen trees. On one of them we saw three does run up and over the hill. Then we new where to look. We checked the last one posible spot and it looked great but no deer was seen. This last one was the farther spot of all. We did not see anybody else going towards it so we thought to give it a try as the first place on Saturday.
We got to the spot when we were starting to see some light. Set up our tripods and binos and started glassing. No deer was around. My friend and my son decide to go walk down into the fingers that went across the field to check and potentially bump a buck out and into the flat were I could shoot. But there were no deers. Then my son comes back and tells us that down in the valley he could see about 9 deer but it was so far that we couldn't tell if one was a buck or not so we decided to follow a trail and go as low as we can to check them.
On our way down, my son and my friend were ahead of me about 30 yards, and all of the sudden I see something inside of a patch of quaking aspens, since we saw a lot of cattle the day before and knowing that there were more hunters in that area I thought it was a cow. I stoped and my son and friend kept going not knowing what was going on. Then I walked about 30 more yards and looked again, I confirmed that it was a deer, but couldn't tell if it was a Doe or a buck. Pulled my binos and confirmed that it was a buck and legal to shoot by the Utah regulations. All this time the buck is like frozen. He didn't even moved his ears. Dropped the binos grabbed my rifle and knowing that it was withing range of my scope zero I aimed and shot. That .308 dropped it on the spot. He didn't even took a step forward. He was done.
It was a very exciting moment. We had heard 5 shots only that morning with at least 80 other people on that mountain range.
I knew that I was not after a trophy buck. It was my first one and I was going to drop anyone as long as it was a legal buck.
I got it done.
My son and my friend came back rushing to the spot. They knew that the one that shot was me.
We shared a great moment together.
Utah has beautiful country. Mountains and fields that go forever.
I will post more pictures soon.
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