I decided to head north and hunt the Sierra range this year. I have spent a ton of time all over the Eastern Sierra for the past 30+ years but for whatever reason haven’t done a ton of hunting there. I wanted to backpack hunt but didn’t want to commit to one spot only. So I planned a week long trip with three spots in mind. I decided we would spend roughly two days in each spot and if there was a good buck we would stay and hunt it and alternatively if we weren’t seeing anything promising we would potentially move to the next spot early. I knew there were deer in all of the spots but I was interested in finding a mature buck for this hunt.
In late September we headed north and although we made good time on the road we got started a little late and had an unexpectedly long lunch stop so when we got to the trailhead we only had about 90 min of light left. Instead of packing in that night we opted to sleep at the trailhead and get up at 330 to hike in. The goal was to hunt two adjacent basins from a high ridge at 11,500 feet. The climb took longer than expected and we reached the glassing spot about an hour late. I was annoyed but it is what it is. We dropped our packs and immediately started glassing. This was a beautiful basin with water and grass, willows and plenty of timber for deer to disappear into in the heat of the day. We saw nothing that morning and I chalked it up to us being late and the unusually warm weather. Temps for our entire hunt were 10-15 degrees warmer than usual for this time of year. We intermittently glassed throughout the day checking the edges of the timber for deer that might pop out to feed or reposition. We killed some more time mid day by dropping several hundred feet to a spring to load up on water and setting up camp in the shale on the top of the ridge. When the shadows started to get long I had hopes that deer would start to come out of the woodwork but nothing showed that evening either. That night we ate our freeze dried meals and sipped whiskey and discussed our options. We decided if we didn’t see anything worth hunting the following morning that it was time to move on. Come the next morning there was very little movement and just as I was getting ready to call it I found a couple of deer. There were three deer in the basin about 1.25 miles away. I could not identify antlers on any of them but they were sparring and playing grab ass like young bucks do. I am quite sure they were all very young bucks and nothing I was interested in hunting. They hit the timber line very early, by 0720 and that was it for that basin.
[One of the basins we hunted at our first spot.]
We quickly jumped over to the other basin, which had shade for longer and glassed for an hour but found nothing. I had seen enough and decided it was time to pull camp and move on. If we left now we could get lunch, resupply on water and pack into the next spot for the evening hunt.
We made our way south and had lunch and got more water and headed to the next trailhead. This spot took some lite 4x4ing to get to but nothing too wild. I bought a new truck 2 years ago after we had our son and I had put off leveling the front end and putting bigger tires on it to spread the cost out a little bit but I got that done before this trip and I’m glad I did. We got the packs reloaded with three days of food and 6 liters of water each and started hiking. I had a feeling we weren’t going to make it to our intended camp in time to glass so I was stopping along the way and glassing with my 10’s from my chest harness as we walked. Sure enough about a mile or a mile and a quarter front the truck I see this brown spot and throw up my binoculars and sure enough it’s a nice buck bedded in the sand on the shady side of this ridge that we are walking on. We sit down and I get out the little spotter we have and I start looking at this buck and he’s a real nice deer. He’s 3 on his left and 4 on his right. He’s in complete side profile so I can’t see his width at all. My first impression is that he’s a little spindly and I think I’ll probably pass on him. Just based on his lack of mass I kind of guess him at 3 years old but that’s tough to say without seeing his body in a standing position. We are at 600 yards, which I’m not going to shoot anyway so we decide to sneak up and try to get a better view to better assess him. I know there’s a good chance that there is another deer with him also and it could be a bigger one. The deer is bedded no more than 5 or 10 yards off the trail. We have no option other than to sneak directly at him with some small stunted pines between us. As we get closer I know we are going to be very close. I chamber a round and put the bipod on the gun and have the little spotter on the tripod in my other hand. We drop our packs a couple hundred yards before where we think we will be able to see the deer. As we are sneaking with the last tree between us and the deer I all-of-a-sudden see the other deer directly down hill from the buck that I had seen. He’s got us pegged. I throw up my binoculars and confirm I don’t want to shoot that deer, he’s a 3 point with very tall G2’s but crabby fronts. He stands up and just starts walking uphill toward where the other deer is and I know he is going to nose the bigger buck out of his bed and they will be gone soon. We hustle up to the tree that we have been using for cover and peak out to the left and sure enough they are staring right at us. I drop to a knee and get the little spotter on them and get a few second look at him before they decide to boogey. He was a lot wider than I would have guessed. I didn’t have a ton of time to assess but I guessed him between 26 and 28 (the deer I ended up shooting was 26 G3 to G3 and this deer was wider). If I had had more time to assess, would I have shot him? Maybe. Hard to say. The mass still wasn’t there which to me pretty much always indicates a younger deer, and we still had plenty of time to hunt. After we settled down from all the excitement and got our stuff repacked we quickly moved up the trail. After finding those deer we elected to move our intended camp to a spot where we could easily glass two basins instead of the one we originally planned to hunt. After seeing those two bucks we were now full of optimism and feeling good.
[The only existing pic of the buck I didn’t shoot, I couldn’t get the camera to focus and didn’t want to waste anymore time on that.]
The next morning we decided to focus on the basin that we had originally come in here to hunt which was a little further down the trail. We got to a good glassing knob early and went to work. This is another basin that looked amazing, water, feed, timber, it had everything - and was completely devoid of deer. As the sun rose and the heat got higher we knew there wasn’t much chance of anything moving. We moved out the trail further to look into another basin that had some shade and still nothing. It was a very long day in the heat with basically zero shade up on the ridge. We moved back down above the basin we had glassed in the morning and tried to nap while we waited for the sun to drop lower. Of course intermittently we would pick apart the shadows hoping to find a buck in the timber but with no luck. Finally around 4 the basin started to get some solid shade and my buddy Bret sees a buck. It’s about 6 or 7 hundred yards below us in the sandy stuff that we are in. It’s been below us all day and apparently was bedded before the sun ever came up. It was a SoCal type 3x3, a great buck for D16 but nothing I was interested in shooting on this tag. We also saw a small bear climbing around in the stunted pines several hundred yards from the deer. Those were the only signs of life in this amazing looking basin. As the afternoon progresses I tell Bret that I want to head back to camp and look out on the plateau that we had seen the bucks on yesterday before dark. I glass back toward camp and see a buck about 100 yards down the hill from our tent in the skyline. It starts to dawn on me…. We are looking in the wrong places…. Doh! The deer are not in the basins. They are up here on the surface of the moon where we are. Not wanting to blow that deer out, we wait for it to disappear and then head back to camp. We creep down the other side being careful to look for the buck that was there until we can see the plateau. There are no deer visible and we are about out of light so we don’t push down the hill any further. We now have decisions to make. We have enough water for the night and 1 liter each for the following day. We can get water if we want to stay here but we will have to drop about 1,000 feet of elevation to get it. We are feeling pretty low after the long uneventful day and the spot that we had planned to go next has water everywhere and it’s starting to sound pretty good. We have seen deer here though and I want to give it a fair chance so we decide to split up the next morning and each take one side of the hill that we are camped on. I will go toward where we saw the deer on the hike in, and Bret will go toward where we saw the smaller 3x3. Either place could very feasibly have a buck at first light.
[The buck down the hill from our camp. These deer are living in the moon rocks at 11K!]
I creep down the hill in the very dim predawn light being sure to glass as I go so I don’t blow anything out, as soon as I can visualize the plateau I glass it with my 10's and I see two bucks right near where we saw the first two while hiking in. I get my 15’s out but in the gray light I can’t make out how big they are. They are probably 1,000 plus yards from me. I figure I may as well try and get as close as I can now, I know that as soon as the sun comes up they are going to disappear as they are immediately going to be in the sunlight. So, I am quietly but quickly moving down the trail towards the plateau, stopping to check on them here and there. Once I reach the bottom of the hill I am going to run out of cover and there will be nothing but hundreds of yards of open sandy ground between me and the deer and it will be an impossible stalk. I might be able to hug the tree line on the ridge top to gain some ground but I am most likely going to need a little help from the deer and I hope they will start moving toward me. As I’m creeping down the last bit of trail behind some small pines I look through a gap in the trees below me and see a bedded deer with a wide rack looking straight at me! I throw my 10’s up and dang if he isn’t a good deer!
[First glimpse of the buck.]
[A look through the 15’s at 112 yards]
At first I think I’m screwed but he doesn’t get up and goes back to chewing his cud after a minute or two. I very slowly put my tripod with my 15’s on it down, slip my pack off and put the bipod on my rifle and sit down. I am on a somewhat steep hill. I get the deer in my 15’s and start to evaluate him. He’s wide and heavy. As it gets lighter I start to see that he doesn’t have length to speak of on anything but his G2’s. His G2’s almost don’t fork and his front forks are crabby. But I keep looking at him and getting the impression that he is an older deer, he’s a good deer, a big deer. In my mind, a big deer is a big deer... And this is what I mean by that: Score and numbers have, to a certain extent, infected the minds of modern hunters. Everyone wants to know “what’s he score? How big is he?” Score is useful to help convey what an animal is to someone that can’t see it in person but to me it doesn’t tell the whole story. I would shoot a 30 inch wide fork horn with mass over a pretty but spindly 150” 4 point all day long. The deer I saw two days before this deer definitely scored way better than this deer. But he was definitely younger and my first impression was that I should pass him. I was having the opposite feeling now. The more I looked at him the more I thought, I can’t pass that deer. That’s a good, mature buck for this area and I need to shoot him. So, I chambered a round and got my pack in front of me, it was too steep to shoot prone downhill and it wasn’t necessary, he was 112 yards from me. I periodically checked on the other deer but they never got closer and I never saw anything that made me want to go shoot one of them anyway. One was a smaller 3 point, the other was bigger but I couldn’t see exactly what he was. There was no way I could move without blowing this deer out anyway. I could have shot him in his bed but I let him chew his cud and watch the sunrise. A few minutes after the sun hit him he rose to his feet and turned, presenting me with a severe quartering-to shot. I very methodically put the crosshair on his right shoulder and squeezed a round off. He dropped right back into his bed and was dead. I just sat there for a while soaking it in, making sure he didn’t move although I knew that wouldn’t be the case.
[Taking it all in after the shot.]
I let Bret and all the relevant people know that I had filled my tag. When I was ready I packed my stuff and made my way to the deer.
When I got to the deer my thoughts on him were confirmed. I was thrilled! I have heard people say “pictures don’t do him justice” before but this is the first deer I have really experienced that with. He is impressive to look at and hold in your hands but every picture I take of him doesn’t seem to convey that, at least to me. He’s got plenty of mass and carries it out and he’s nice and wide, tip to tip on G3’s he’s 26. I know the deer up there are much larger than our southern mule deer in SoCal but my goodness was he big bodied. Bret wasn’t far away and got to me quickly and we took pictures and tagged him and proceeded with taking him apart.
[Appreciating a cool buck.]
[Me and Killer Miller]
[Loading up]
[Tricer ads all day long.]
[Heavy loads]
[Packing out.]
As per usual the Barnes TTSX was deadly and the deer did not take one step. I am losing count of animals that fall over dead in their tracks when those things hit them.
The packout wasn’t too bad and we got out in the mid-afternoon and had beers and went for a swim in a lake. We got a real dinner for once and then we bandit camped that night out in the BLM and drove home the next day.
[Theres not much better in life than this!]
In late September we headed north and although we made good time on the road we got started a little late and had an unexpectedly long lunch stop so when we got to the trailhead we only had about 90 min of light left. Instead of packing in that night we opted to sleep at the trailhead and get up at 330 to hike in. The goal was to hunt two adjacent basins from a high ridge at 11,500 feet. The climb took longer than expected and we reached the glassing spot about an hour late. I was annoyed but it is what it is. We dropped our packs and immediately started glassing. This was a beautiful basin with water and grass, willows and plenty of timber for deer to disappear into in the heat of the day. We saw nothing that morning and I chalked it up to us being late and the unusually warm weather. Temps for our entire hunt were 10-15 degrees warmer than usual for this time of year. We intermittently glassed throughout the day checking the edges of the timber for deer that might pop out to feed or reposition. We killed some more time mid day by dropping several hundred feet to a spring to load up on water and setting up camp in the shale on the top of the ridge. When the shadows started to get long I had hopes that deer would start to come out of the woodwork but nothing showed that evening either. That night we ate our freeze dried meals and sipped whiskey and discussed our options. We decided if we didn’t see anything worth hunting the following morning that it was time to move on. Come the next morning there was very little movement and just as I was getting ready to call it I found a couple of deer. There were three deer in the basin about 1.25 miles away. I could not identify antlers on any of them but they were sparring and playing grab ass like young bucks do. I am quite sure they were all very young bucks and nothing I was interested in hunting. They hit the timber line very early, by 0720 and that was it for that basin.
[One of the basins we hunted at our first spot.]
We quickly jumped over to the other basin, which had shade for longer and glassed for an hour but found nothing. I had seen enough and decided it was time to pull camp and move on. If we left now we could get lunch, resupply on water and pack into the next spot for the evening hunt.
We made our way south and had lunch and got more water and headed to the next trailhead. This spot took some lite 4x4ing to get to but nothing too wild. I bought a new truck 2 years ago after we had our son and I had put off leveling the front end and putting bigger tires on it to spread the cost out a little bit but I got that done before this trip and I’m glad I did. We got the packs reloaded with three days of food and 6 liters of water each and started hiking. I had a feeling we weren’t going to make it to our intended camp in time to glass so I was stopping along the way and glassing with my 10’s from my chest harness as we walked. Sure enough about a mile or a mile and a quarter front the truck I see this brown spot and throw up my binoculars and sure enough it’s a nice buck bedded in the sand on the shady side of this ridge that we are walking on. We sit down and I get out the little spotter we have and I start looking at this buck and he’s a real nice deer. He’s 3 on his left and 4 on his right. He’s in complete side profile so I can’t see his width at all. My first impression is that he’s a little spindly and I think I’ll probably pass on him. Just based on his lack of mass I kind of guess him at 3 years old but that’s tough to say without seeing his body in a standing position. We are at 600 yards, which I’m not going to shoot anyway so we decide to sneak up and try to get a better view to better assess him. I know there’s a good chance that there is another deer with him also and it could be a bigger one. The deer is bedded no more than 5 or 10 yards off the trail. We have no option other than to sneak directly at him with some small stunted pines between us. As we get closer I know we are going to be very close. I chamber a round and put the bipod on the gun and have the little spotter on the tripod in my other hand. We drop our packs a couple hundred yards before where we think we will be able to see the deer. As we are sneaking with the last tree between us and the deer I all-of-a-sudden see the other deer directly down hill from the buck that I had seen. He’s got us pegged. I throw up my binoculars and confirm I don’t want to shoot that deer, he’s a 3 point with very tall G2’s but crabby fronts. He stands up and just starts walking uphill toward where the other deer is and I know he is going to nose the bigger buck out of his bed and they will be gone soon. We hustle up to the tree that we have been using for cover and peak out to the left and sure enough they are staring right at us. I drop to a knee and get the little spotter on them and get a few second look at him before they decide to boogey. He was a lot wider than I would have guessed. I didn’t have a ton of time to assess but I guessed him between 26 and 28 (the deer I ended up shooting was 26 G3 to G3 and this deer was wider). If I had had more time to assess, would I have shot him? Maybe. Hard to say. The mass still wasn’t there which to me pretty much always indicates a younger deer, and we still had plenty of time to hunt. After we settled down from all the excitement and got our stuff repacked we quickly moved up the trail. After finding those deer we elected to move our intended camp to a spot where we could easily glass two basins instead of the one we originally planned to hunt. After seeing those two bucks we were now full of optimism and feeling good.
[The only existing pic of the buck I didn’t shoot, I couldn’t get the camera to focus and didn’t want to waste anymore time on that.]
The next morning we decided to focus on the basin that we had originally come in here to hunt which was a little further down the trail. We got to a good glassing knob early and went to work. This is another basin that looked amazing, water, feed, timber, it had everything - and was completely devoid of deer. As the sun rose and the heat got higher we knew there wasn’t much chance of anything moving. We moved out the trail further to look into another basin that had some shade and still nothing. It was a very long day in the heat with basically zero shade up on the ridge. We moved back down above the basin we had glassed in the morning and tried to nap while we waited for the sun to drop lower. Of course intermittently we would pick apart the shadows hoping to find a buck in the timber but with no luck. Finally around 4 the basin started to get some solid shade and my buddy Bret sees a buck. It’s about 6 or 7 hundred yards below us in the sandy stuff that we are in. It’s been below us all day and apparently was bedded before the sun ever came up. It was a SoCal type 3x3, a great buck for D16 but nothing I was interested in shooting on this tag. We also saw a small bear climbing around in the stunted pines several hundred yards from the deer. Those were the only signs of life in this amazing looking basin. As the afternoon progresses I tell Bret that I want to head back to camp and look out on the plateau that we had seen the bucks on yesterday before dark. I glass back toward camp and see a buck about 100 yards down the hill from our tent in the skyline. It starts to dawn on me…. We are looking in the wrong places…. Doh! The deer are not in the basins. They are up here on the surface of the moon where we are. Not wanting to blow that deer out, we wait for it to disappear and then head back to camp. We creep down the other side being careful to look for the buck that was there until we can see the plateau. There are no deer visible and we are about out of light so we don’t push down the hill any further. We now have decisions to make. We have enough water for the night and 1 liter each for the following day. We can get water if we want to stay here but we will have to drop about 1,000 feet of elevation to get it. We are feeling pretty low after the long uneventful day and the spot that we had planned to go next has water everywhere and it’s starting to sound pretty good. We have seen deer here though and I want to give it a fair chance so we decide to split up the next morning and each take one side of the hill that we are camped on. I will go toward where we saw the deer on the hike in, and Bret will go toward where we saw the smaller 3x3. Either place could very feasibly have a buck at first light.
[The buck down the hill from our camp. These deer are living in the moon rocks at 11K!]
I creep down the hill in the very dim predawn light being sure to glass as I go so I don’t blow anything out, as soon as I can visualize the plateau I glass it with my 10's and I see two bucks right near where we saw the first two while hiking in. I get my 15’s out but in the gray light I can’t make out how big they are. They are probably 1,000 plus yards from me. I figure I may as well try and get as close as I can now, I know that as soon as the sun comes up they are going to disappear as they are immediately going to be in the sunlight. So, I am quietly but quickly moving down the trail towards the plateau, stopping to check on them here and there. Once I reach the bottom of the hill I am going to run out of cover and there will be nothing but hundreds of yards of open sandy ground between me and the deer and it will be an impossible stalk. I might be able to hug the tree line on the ridge top to gain some ground but I am most likely going to need a little help from the deer and I hope they will start moving toward me. As I’m creeping down the last bit of trail behind some small pines I look through a gap in the trees below me and see a bedded deer with a wide rack looking straight at me! I throw my 10’s up and dang if he isn’t a good deer!
[First glimpse of the buck.]
[A look through the 15’s at 112 yards]
At first I think I’m screwed but he doesn’t get up and goes back to chewing his cud after a minute or two. I very slowly put my tripod with my 15’s on it down, slip my pack off and put the bipod on my rifle and sit down. I am on a somewhat steep hill. I get the deer in my 15’s and start to evaluate him. He’s wide and heavy. As it gets lighter I start to see that he doesn’t have length to speak of on anything but his G2’s. His G2’s almost don’t fork and his front forks are crabby. But I keep looking at him and getting the impression that he is an older deer, he’s a good deer, a big deer. In my mind, a big deer is a big deer... And this is what I mean by that: Score and numbers have, to a certain extent, infected the minds of modern hunters. Everyone wants to know “what’s he score? How big is he?” Score is useful to help convey what an animal is to someone that can’t see it in person but to me it doesn’t tell the whole story. I would shoot a 30 inch wide fork horn with mass over a pretty but spindly 150” 4 point all day long. The deer I saw two days before this deer definitely scored way better than this deer. But he was definitely younger and my first impression was that I should pass him. I was having the opposite feeling now. The more I looked at him the more I thought, I can’t pass that deer. That’s a good, mature buck for this area and I need to shoot him. So, I chambered a round and got my pack in front of me, it was too steep to shoot prone downhill and it wasn’t necessary, he was 112 yards from me. I periodically checked on the other deer but they never got closer and I never saw anything that made me want to go shoot one of them anyway. One was a smaller 3 point, the other was bigger but I couldn’t see exactly what he was. There was no way I could move without blowing this deer out anyway. I could have shot him in his bed but I let him chew his cud and watch the sunrise. A few minutes after the sun hit him he rose to his feet and turned, presenting me with a severe quartering-to shot. I very methodically put the crosshair on his right shoulder and squeezed a round off. He dropped right back into his bed and was dead. I just sat there for a while soaking it in, making sure he didn’t move although I knew that wouldn’t be the case.
[Taking it all in after the shot.]
I let Bret and all the relevant people know that I had filled my tag. When I was ready I packed my stuff and made my way to the deer.
When I got to the deer my thoughts on him were confirmed. I was thrilled! I have heard people say “pictures don’t do him justice” before but this is the first deer I have really experienced that with. He is impressive to look at and hold in your hands but every picture I take of him doesn’t seem to convey that, at least to me. He’s got plenty of mass and carries it out and he’s nice and wide, tip to tip on G3’s he’s 26. I know the deer up there are much larger than our southern mule deer in SoCal but my goodness was he big bodied. Bret wasn’t far away and got to me quickly and we took pictures and tagged him and proceeded with taking him apart.
[Appreciating a cool buck.]
[Me and Killer Miller]
[Loading up]
[Tricer ads all day long.]
[Heavy loads]
[Packing out.]
As per usual the Barnes TTSX was deadly and the deer did not take one step. I am losing count of animals that fall over dead in their tracks when those things hit them.
The packout wasn’t too bad and we got out in the mid-afternoon and had beers and went for a swim in a lake. We got a real dinner for once and then we bandit camped that night out in the BLM and drove home the next day.
[Theres not much better in life than this!]
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