birdman27
Well-known member
Hi all,
I was lucky enough to help my friend who drew the tag for this hunt. We both grew up hunting high desert muleys, so years of chasing blacktail with little luck had us ready to go after muleys again. We were joined by a third friend to round out the group and provide eyeballs to find the deer.
The tag holder was able to spend part of his summer vacation in the unit looking at the habitat and figuring out some areas to target. The day before the hunt we all left our respective homes at 4AM (me from Santa Rosa, them from Chico), with a plan to meet in Lodi for some breakfast, then caravan down to Kernville. We arrived there around 1PM and stopped for a well deserved beer and bite to eat at Kern River Brewing Company (recommended!). One final gas up and we were on the road to the first spot we wanted to check out. We headed up Sherman Pass Road to 22S12, but when we arrived the gate was closed! So, we headed back down and decided to camp by the river for that first night and hunt a lower drainage the first morning before pushing higher up past Johnsondale. Well, being brewers and not having seen each other for about a year, we got a little rowdy that night, which made for a rough first morning. We still did our planned hike, but it wasnt as vigorous as we had planned...
After that hike, we broke camp and took the drive up. We found our campsite then pushed on up the road. We parked near Sentinel Rock and worked those ridges and bowls. There was snow on the ground, but no deeper than 6 inches anywhere and it didnt seem to have pushed the deer very much. That first push was brutal, with slick conditions and tons of brush. When we finally stopped for a breather with a little view, I glassed a few ridges over and spotted a bedded doe about 800 yards away. This was exciting for me because after my blacktail hunt this past fall I wasnt sure if I even knew what deer looked like anymore! We made a plan to move closer for a better view of the situation. We gained another couple hundred feet of elevation and traversed over to an open spot and within 30 seconds had found more deer on that hillside, including a nice fat forky. My friend is no trophy hunter, so it was tempting to take the shot, but being the first day and getting into deer so quickly convinced him to hold off. We back tracked around the rock and hit another north facing slope for some still hunting, which produced a couple more does and more rough country. Back at the truck we found our other friend who informed us of the nice four point he saw while driving up the road. Oh well, so it goes! The next day saw us back in the same area, but the hunting was much tougher with only a few does sighted through a real slog.
Knowing we could always return to the area, we decided to hunt somewhere else the next day and made a plan to drive back up to the gated road we had originally wanted to go down. We got up early with the plan to get there about an hour before dawn to walk down the road and up into the area we wanted to hunt. Well, lo and behold, the gate was open and we were able to drive in a ways before we parked and hiked up. Thought we wouldnt know it at the time, we chose the best ridge to walk up, in that it was fairly open and not choked with brush. About 3/4 of the way to the ridgeline I looked across the draw and spotted a doe and fawn before the sun was even up. We knew it was going to be a good day at that point. When we crested the ridgeline we realized we had luckily (and I do mean luckily) found a great drainage with lots of places to glass with cover and feed, basically deer heaven. We started skirting up to the head of the basin and within 100 yards spotted a doe out in front of us, which on closer inspection was 4 does. So we stopped to glass about half way to the top and I look across to the opposite ridge and pretty quickly find deer, one of which turns out to be a good buck. The shot is probably 350-400 yards, slightly uphill and my buddy just wasnt comfortable with it, so we watched and started to strategize how to get closer. As we are chatting, our other friend speaks up and says "those deer look scared" and indeed, they were milling nervously and moving down slowly. Not much later, maybe a minute or two a shot rings out, followed by another, and, as we were watching, the deer went down. Turns out these guys had come in from the backside of the basin and come down the ridgeline on the deer. They were definitely in the right place to make that play and I was glad to be able to watch someone harvest that great deer, because our chances were pretty low to get in on them. At the same time, we were bummed, because that pretty much cleared out the drainage, with does and a spike scattering in all directions. We watched their escape routes and made plans to check out where they went over. Then we worked up to the head of the basin and figured out the lay of the land. (Pic 1 is my hunting companions, with the orange vest being the tag holder. Pic 2 is a panorama of the basin; we came over essentially right in the middle bottom of the picture, down the west ridgeline.)
While up there, I was checking out the other areas and I was convinced a big buck was in the stand of trees on this promontory in the middle, but I couldn't convince anyone to try to get up there with me...
We decided to work back down the backside of the same ridge to the truck, popping over at regular intervals to check the various draws. On our second look we found a great rock shelf from which to glass. Within minutes my buddy spotted a doe down the draw directly below us. We watched for not much longer and a buck appeared from the draw below her, checking things out. He was another good one, looked like a big 3. After watching for a minute, even though it was a long shot, my buddy decided to take it. He gets settled prone on his pack and squeezes the trigger. Immediately he says miss, as he jerked on the shot. Buck fever is real, even for older hunters! The buck ran about 5 yards and stopped, as did the does. After a few minutes his libido kicked back in and he moved onto the does an opening. My buddy settled and sent another bullet on its way, followed by a couple more. Each one seemed close, but not quite a hit. Eventually the deer moved off down the draw, only to pop out closer to the road. We watched as the buck bedded down, thinking for sure he must have been hit and we just missed it. As we game planned moving down for another shot, another good buck moved on him and kicked him out of his bed. We watched them mill about chasing each other for a few minutes when our buddy said "uh oh, there is a truck coming down the road". We decided to watch and hope the deer moved away from the road into a position we could get another shot. But nope, the truck stopped, hunter got out and bang, bang, one of the bucks was down. (Before anyone asks, I can't be sure, but I think he did shoot from the road, given the timing of the shot, which I know is illegal. I didn't contact a LEO because I wasn't positive). The other buck slipped away to the left and the does took off to the right. (Pic 4, shooting lane. For the first shot, the deer was just to the left of the tallest, closest dead tree at the bottom of the picture in the snow. For the next few, he was about 20 yards to the left. Pic 5 is the pile of rocks we shot from.). We knew we had to check for a hit, so we moved down to make sure we hadnt injured another buck. We got down there and found no blood or fur, either in the shot location or the bed. We tracked the buck through two little draws, but he had booked it out of there. Talking about it later, we figured out he was shooting high. Though it was a long shot, in the excitement we forgot to adjust for shooting angle and he should have been holding dead on. Oh well. None of us had ever watched another hunting party get an animal in front of us, so that was pretty neat to see twice in one day. I wish we hadnt pushed the deer to the road to those other hunters, but such is life.
Both my buddy and I had to leave the next night, so the next day was our last full day together. The hunter planned to stay another day or two, but was getting ready to go home as well.That night we looked at the map and figured out how those other hunters got to the top of the ridge, and planned to go in that way in the morning. We got up there at first light and didnt see anything in that basin. We worked our way down the east ridge (where the other deer had been shot) and the backside. Down past where the deer had been the previous morning we came on two does and two forkies, completely unaware we were there. Given their gaunt appearance and the distance from the truck, my buddy passed, though he was getting into meat hunting mode. The rest of the day passed with no deer being seen. I packed up camp quick and made it home just after midnight, after a great, but exhausting, 4 day hunt. I sent my buddies a text letting them know I was home and wishing them good luck.
The next day would have a happy ending as I got a text that afternoon stating "Good luck received" with the following picture. Not the biggest deer, but meat on the table. My friend went back to the same spot and this guy walked out at 15 yards around 8:30 in the morning, just as my friend was deciding to call it a hunt. One shot and it was all over, minus a bit of pack out! Thanks everyone for reading, I know it was a novel, but I wanted to get it all down before I forgot. Cheers!
I was lucky enough to help my friend who drew the tag for this hunt. We both grew up hunting high desert muleys, so years of chasing blacktail with little luck had us ready to go after muleys again. We were joined by a third friend to round out the group and provide eyeballs to find the deer.
The tag holder was able to spend part of his summer vacation in the unit looking at the habitat and figuring out some areas to target. The day before the hunt we all left our respective homes at 4AM (me from Santa Rosa, them from Chico), with a plan to meet in Lodi for some breakfast, then caravan down to Kernville. We arrived there around 1PM and stopped for a well deserved beer and bite to eat at Kern River Brewing Company (recommended!). One final gas up and we were on the road to the first spot we wanted to check out. We headed up Sherman Pass Road to 22S12, but when we arrived the gate was closed! So, we headed back down and decided to camp by the river for that first night and hunt a lower drainage the first morning before pushing higher up past Johnsondale. Well, being brewers and not having seen each other for about a year, we got a little rowdy that night, which made for a rough first morning. We still did our planned hike, but it wasnt as vigorous as we had planned...
After that hike, we broke camp and took the drive up. We found our campsite then pushed on up the road. We parked near Sentinel Rock and worked those ridges and bowls. There was snow on the ground, but no deeper than 6 inches anywhere and it didnt seem to have pushed the deer very much. That first push was brutal, with slick conditions and tons of brush. When we finally stopped for a breather with a little view, I glassed a few ridges over and spotted a bedded doe about 800 yards away. This was exciting for me because after my blacktail hunt this past fall I wasnt sure if I even knew what deer looked like anymore! We made a plan to move closer for a better view of the situation. We gained another couple hundred feet of elevation and traversed over to an open spot and within 30 seconds had found more deer on that hillside, including a nice fat forky. My friend is no trophy hunter, so it was tempting to take the shot, but being the first day and getting into deer so quickly convinced him to hold off. We back tracked around the rock and hit another north facing slope for some still hunting, which produced a couple more does and more rough country. Back at the truck we found our other friend who informed us of the nice four point he saw while driving up the road. Oh well, so it goes! The next day saw us back in the same area, but the hunting was much tougher with only a few does sighted through a real slog.
Knowing we could always return to the area, we decided to hunt somewhere else the next day and made a plan to drive back up to the gated road we had originally wanted to go down. We got up early with the plan to get there about an hour before dawn to walk down the road and up into the area we wanted to hunt. Well, lo and behold, the gate was open and we were able to drive in a ways before we parked and hiked up. Thought we wouldnt know it at the time, we chose the best ridge to walk up, in that it was fairly open and not choked with brush. About 3/4 of the way to the ridgeline I looked across the draw and spotted a doe and fawn before the sun was even up. We knew it was going to be a good day at that point. When we crested the ridgeline we realized we had luckily (and I do mean luckily) found a great drainage with lots of places to glass with cover and feed, basically deer heaven. We started skirting up to the head of the basin and within 100 yards spotted a doe out in front of us, which on closer inspection was 4 does. So we stopped to glass about half way to the top and I look across to the opposite ridge and pretty quickly find deer, one of which turns out to be a good buck. The shot is probably 350-400 yards, slightly uphill and my buddy just wasnt comfortable with it, so we watched and started to strategize how to get closer. As we are chatting, our other friend speaks up and says "those deer look scared" and indeed, they were milling nervously and moving down slowly. Not much later, maybe a minute or two a shot rings out, followed by another, and, as we were watching, the deer went down. Turns out these guys had come in from the backside of the basin and come down the ridgeline on the deer. They were definitely in the right place to make that play and I was glad to be able to watch someone harvest that great deer, because our chances were pretty low to get in on them. At the same time, we were bummed, because that pretty much cleared out the drainage, with does and a spike scattering in all directions. We watched their escape routes and made plans to check out where they went over. Then we worked up to the head of the basin and figured out the lay of the land. (Pic 1 is my hunting companions, with the orange vest being the tag holder. Pic 2 is a panorama of the basin; we came over essentially right in the middle bottom of the picture, down the west ridgeline.)
While up there, I was checking out the other areas and I was convinced a big buck was in the stand of trees on this promontory in the middle, but I couldn't convince anyone to try to get up there with me...
We decided to work back down the backside of the same ridge to the truck, popping over at regular intervals to check the various draws. On our second look we found a great rock shelf from which to glass. Within minutes my buddy spotted a doe down the draw directly below us. We watched for not much longer and a buck appeared from the draw below her, checking things out. He was another good one, looked like a big 3. After watching for a minute, even though it was a long shot, my buddy decided to take it. He gets settled prone on his pack and squeezes the trigger. Immediately he says miss, as he jerked on the shot. Buck fever is real, even for older hunters! The buck ran about 5 yards and stopped, as did the does. After a few minutes his libido kicked back in and he moved onto the does an opening. My buddy settled and sent another bullet on its way, followed by a couple more. Each one seemed close, but not quite a hit. Eventually the deer moved off down the draw, only to pop out closer to the road. We watched as the buck bedded down, thinking for sure he must have been hit and we just missed it. As we game planned moving down for another shot, another good buck moved on him and kicked him out of his bed. We watched them mill about chasing each other for a few minutes when our buddy said "uh oh, there is a truck coming down the road". We decided to watch and hope the deer moved away from the road into a position we could get another shot. But nope, the truck stopped, hunter got out and bang, bang, one of the bucks was down. (Before anyone asks, I can't be sure, but I think he did shoot from the road, given the timing of the shot, which I know is illegal. I didn't contact a LEO because I wasn't positive). The other buck slipped away to the left and the does took off to the right. (Pic 4, shooting lane. For the first shot, the deer was just to the left of the tallest, closest dead tree at the bottom of the picture in the snow. For the next few, he was about 20 yards to the left. Pic 5 is the pile of rocks we shot from.). We knew we had to check for a hit, so we moved down to make sure we hadnt injured another buck. We got down there and found no blood or fur, either in the shot location or the bed. We tracked the buck through two little draws, but he had booked it out of there. Talking about it later, we figured out he was shooting high. Though it was a long shot, in the excitement we forgot to adjust for shooting angle and he should have been holding dead on. Oh well. None of us had ever watched another hunting party get an animal in front of us, so that was pretty neat to see twice in one day. I wish we hadnt pushed the deer to the road to those other hunters, but such is life.
Both my buddy and I had to leave the next night, so the next day was our last full day together. The hunter planned to stay another day or two, but was getting ready to go home as well.That night we looked at the map and figured out how those other hunters got to the top of the ridge, and planned to go in that way in the morning. We got up there at first light and didnt see anything in that basin. We worked our way down the east ridge (where the other deer had been shot) and the backside. Down past where the deer had been the previous morning we came on two does and two forkies, completely unaware we were there. Given their gaunt appearance and the distance from the truck, my buddy passed, though he was getting into meat hunting mode. The rest of the day passed with no deer being seen. I packed up camp quick and made it home just after midnight, after a great, but exhausting, 4 day hunt. I sent my buddies a text letting them know I was home and wishing them good luck.
The next day would have a happy ending as I got a text that afternoon stating "Good luck received" with the following picture. Not the biggest deer, but meat on the table. My friend went back to the same spot and this guy walked out at 15 yards around 8:30 in the morning, just as my friend was deciding to call it a hunt. One shot and it was all over, minus a bit of pack out! Thanks everyone for reading, I know it was a novel, but I wanted to get it all down before I forgot. Cheers!
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