00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Tony Peterson.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I’m rouse Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about hanging stands in the preseason and what we often get wrong. We are all experiencing some weird form of time compression where the days and weeks and months and years are just all flying by. It literally feels impossible that we are only weeks away from a lot of the early bow openers cross country. That means it’s time to leave the fish alone start thinking about the deer they’re scouting, you know, of course, but also the work of hanging stands in the preseason, which is what I’m going to talk about right now, or more specifically, the mistakes we often make while hanging stands in August and then not revisiting them until the fall is firmly upon us and it’s too late to change anything. When I was growing up, I had two dreams. Well, actually I had three. I guess when I was really little, I wanted to make pizzas for a living, because at some point I saw one of those guys who can twirl the pizza doll in the air to get it into a nice pizza shape, and I thought that was about as high as a fella from a small town in Minnesota could fly career wise. Now, if I’m being honest, I achieved that dream pretty early in my life. And let me tell you, cooking pizzas for a living isn’t as glamorous as you might think. Shocking, I know. My other two dreams were to become an outdoor writer and host a phishing show. I hit the outdoor writer thing hard and it worked pretty well for a long time, until people stopped reading magazines and newspapers and well reading mostly anything. But the dream of being a big time fishing shows just eluded me, no matter how much I flirted with it. This year, that all changed, and soon you’ll get to watch me host a fishing show that I can’t really talk about yet. I can say that I fished for a lot of different species and a lot of different lakes and it was a lot of fun and a lot of different types of frustrating, as is the case with you know, filming anything in Mother Nature. One of the shows I did put me in a musky country, targeting the fish of a whole lot of casts. Now. I caught my first muskie when I was in high school on Dumbell Lake in northern Minnesota. That little thirty inch fish hit a pop bar and was a real touch and go fight until he got in the net and we marveled at the barring on his sides and the reality that one of us had actually caught a fish that to that point was pure myth. Later, while working out of the in Fisherman office in Brainerd, I wet waited the crow Ring River for smallies and I was just standing there and wate deep water, you know, this tannic, nice water. When a fish flashed at my swimming jig. I was in smalling mode, so I thought maybe I was onto the state record, but my follow up cast showed me that it was something much bigger and much toothier. I landed that forty inch musky while my buddy swam across the river with his rod in his mouth to help me take photos. Since then, I’ve got a few more muskies, largely by accident. And to put it bluntly, I’m not a real musky fisherman in kind of the same way that I’m not a real duck hunter. I know what both pursuits consist of, but I take the easy way out and don’t take either too seriously. Well, you have to kind of take it seriously when you’re filming a show dedicated to fishing for a certain species like muskies. But I’m not conditioned, you know, doing a figure eight on every cast. I’m super distractable on the water, And well, I like to catch fish more than I like to not catch fish. While trying to catch a trophy fish, I do a poor job of being a musky fisherman, even though I did end up putting a few in the boat. But when I engage in something like that, I’m reminded of how there is sort of a buttoned up best practices kind of approach to things that the real diehards engage in, and then a whole bunch of levels below that, which can result in success, but generally not the kind of success that the diehard’s fine. This exists all over in the things we love to do, including you guessed it, golf, just kidding, it’s deer hunting, and in this case, hanging stands. Now, I, like most of us, have some holes in my deer hunting game that really bother me. But one area I have supreme confidence in is the stand hanging game. I don’t know how many stands I have hung in my life, but I’m going to round up to an even one million here. I honestly love the task. I love reading spots and trees and trying to figure out exactly how to get the best setups going and then how to access them. And even with all of that backslapping I’m given myself, I also have to say this, I screw up a lot. And the times that I screw up the most are when I’m setting preseason stands that I won’t return to until the season is open. When I walk in and hang a set to hunt, I just tend to get it mostly right or at least more right. But when I’m hanging a stand six weeks before the season, I often get crucial parts wrong. There are some obvious reasons for this that you should pay attention to, because I’ll bet you get some of them wrong as well. The first one is simply not reading the tree or the spot correctly for when you’ll actually hunt it. If you’ve never hung a preseason stand, if you’ve never hung a preseason stan, only to return and, say late October, to realize that you stick out worse than I don’t know someone drowning worms for trout on one of those snooty Bozeman trout rivers where mustaches and fish whistles are mandatory and you have to hold your rod in your mouth for every photo of a twelve inch rainbow to let your ninety seven followers know you’ve caught a fish the hard way, like a real man. Anyway, when the leaves come down, that stand sticks out. This only gets worse if you’re the kind of hunter who faces his stand toward the most likely approach. I’ve said this a thousand times, and I suspect this won’t be the last time. But an easy insurance policy against getting busted is to hang your stands facing away from where the deer going to approach from. Not every tree demands this, though, but a lot of them do. And if you have the option to shoot around the tree while keeping the trunk between you and the deer. You’ve just given yourself a real advantage. It’s not always necessary in the early season either, but if it can be done, I always do it, and I mean always. This point sort of walks in lockstep with something else that I see a lot trimming mistakes. There are two ways this goes. The first is that you get into a tree and you get your stand up, and then you use a pole saw to cut a lane here and there and there and there, and pretty soon you’re like, well, I can shoot three hundred and sixty degrees around my stand to every single trail. This only gets worse when you have a buddy, you know, with you who can walk around and trim everything up according to your direction. Now, don’t get me wrong, cutting lanes is important, but what you cut in August that doesn’t seem like much will appear to be a lot of cutting as the season progresses. You don’t want to leave yourself with no cover. And I know this is hard to do, but at most ranges we are in white tails. A basketball sized hole is more than enough to shoot through. Bigger is not always better, but try to think about how much you’d really need to get an ethical shot through and don’t go much bigger if you don’t have to. It’s also a good idea to hinge cut limbs instead of fully sawing them off if you can use them to hide yourself in any way. The goal is to give yourself the shot opportunities you think you’ll need without going overboard and exposing yourself too much. Of course, you also have to factor in the under trimming game, which is an easy one to play when it’s one hundred and four degrees with one hundred percent humidity. The good enough attitude on stand hanging has saved a lot of bucks, and a great way to avoid this trap is to have that buddy with you who can walk the trails and eyeball you in your stand. If you don’t have that option and are more of a solo stand hanger, get down and walk all the way around your stand and eyeball your setup. How would you shoot sitting down or standing up? At each trail and needs to be trimmed to open up some of those lanes. To take this a step further, let’s say you have a trail that is twenty yards out. You don’t really have any good openings to shoot, but you need a couple. What I look for in this situation is something that will block a deer’s view, like a big old tree close to the trail where he has to pass on the far side, because when he’s back there, I can draw, and when he walks out, I can shoot him. Now, he might go down the trail one way or he might go down the other way. So I want to be able to shoot on both sides of that tree. That’s never a bad move. The key is to understand why you’re cutting those lanes, where you’re cutting those lanes, and to give yourself a nice little advantage by using what’s already out there to block his vision and allow you to make the biggest movement that you probably need to make. And speaking of big moves in your stand, when you hang one, sit in it and get a real feel for it, is it crooked at all? Because a tiny bit crooked for five minutes in August will feel like the Titanic going down during a five hour sit in October. It’s so much easier to fine tune them in the preseason when the pressure is weeks away than it is when you go in there. During the season, and you do not want to be uncomfortable on a stand because you’ll move more and you’ll willingly sit for less time. Both of those things will cost you deer eventually. Take a look around at the limbs, the lanes and what you be dealing with. To draw a bow while both sitting and standing, Where would you put your bowhanger if you use one? How about where are you going to hang your pack? This is little stuff, but it matters the first time you go in, especially if your first cit is in the morning. Does your stand shift or squeak at all when you move either one of those things now might seem like a non issue, but it’ll be a different story when it gets it’s cold and you have one hundred and thirty five inchro walking in. Trust me on that one. Make a note on your phone what winds would be absolutely perfect, what would be questionable, and what would be a for sure no go. This one seems obvious, but it’s not. We go in, hang a set, tell ourselves as good for a west wind, and then we head back to the truck. Then the season hits and we get a west wind, but the conditions have the deer coming in from somewhere we didn’t anticipate way back in August, or we now realize that a straight west wind would be fine, but it’s always got a little, you know, north kicker to it, or a south kicker, and we have think that through in the moment we have that moment of weighing risk. Do you sit with a thin margin? Maybe, but maybe that costs you a deer. I don’t want to make this sound like a neurotic, detail obsessed hunter, because I’m not. I’ve just made a lot of mistakes, and when I make those mistakes, I hate myself a little more with each one, particularly when I could have easily prevented myself from making such dumb mistakes. And of the dumb mistakes I’ve made, the ones that bother me the most are the entrance route mistakes. I’ve talked about this a lot, so I’m gonna skip some of the basics. I’ll just say this, mark your routes well, trim them well. Imagine walking down them in the dark with a great big backpack on while trying to be super quiet, and give yourself a real shot of success by clearing them correctly. The key to this is to think about what you have to step on, and basically, if it’s not bare dirt, it’s going to be loud. Leaves are an obvious noise maker, but sticks and branches and rocks are both loud and sound a hell of a lot like a big animal going through the woods. Now, leaves can sound like a lot of things, but squirrels don’t crack big sticks, and bunnies don’t step on rocks and make them clunk hard against other rocks. Walking through water is loud, too, but I’ve come to not care that as much. I don’t think there’s a critter out there that can tell the difference between a boot and the water and a hoof. But it’s also a good idea to go slow and try to stay as quiet as possible. These days, not only do I tack my trails, but I also use my track or feature on ONEX to record my exact route. I like this for obvious reasons, but also because it shows me how long it takes to walk it. In good conditions, I can add in a buffer for it being dark and me trying to be quiet and plan my hunts a little better. I honestly find myself using that feature a lot and if you aren’t, you should probably check it out. In my experience, it has proven to be useful in small game hunting, upland hunting, and definitely during blood trails when things aren’t going super well. Now, while I’m on the topic of entrance and exit routes, I should say this, The whole route needs to be planned out. This isn’t just a point A to B thing where you try to get there quietly. Think about what the wind would be like walking in for an evening sit, or what you’d have to walk out and throw after a hunt. Does your morning route take you super close to the only beanfield on the farm you’re gonna spook deer. You might need to swing wide and take three times as long to get there, but you’ll get there safely. And then when you plan the route close to your stand, think about how you’ll approach your stand. You know, I use knee high rubber boots and I try to keep my scent signature low. But deer really good at smelling people, and I’d rather not have them have to walk over my entrance trail before they get to where I can shoot them. That’s just asking for trouble. I’ve hung a lot of stands in my life where I got within, say, I don’t know, fifty or seventy yards of the stand and then cleared my entrance route to sort of loop way around the rest of the route might be pretty straightforward, but there are often times where I anticipate deer to come from a certain direction, and I want them to be able to walk through that as far as possible before they have the potential to hit my trail. This does one obvious thing and one not so obvious thing. The first is that it keeps them from smelling where I walked when they first get into range. That’s huge, honestly. But the second is that in a lot of situations, it puts the deer well out of my danger zone. If they do happen to smell where I walked, that cagy dough with two fawns might get a whiff of something she doesn’t like, But I’d rather have her do that when she’s fifty yards out instead of fifteen, because if she is fifteen, she’s eventually going to look up, and when she does, she’s not going to stop looking at me until she blows and blows and clears out the section. If a deer is going to get wiggy at all at my presence, I really want them as far away as possible. This is one way to do that, but not all spots are conducive to that sort of entrance route. Many are, especially staging areas, setups or stands on funnels and pinch points. The other way to look at this is if there is a way to choose a tree next to a washout or a gully or something you can use to access it. You know, for the last however, many yards and it’s a kind of thing that deer are very unlikely to enter. That’s great. It takes a lot of work to hang stands correctly, and you really don’t want to put in all of that sweat equity only to take a lazy approach to actually getting to the stand, which could cost you a buck. There are probably a million things I’m missing here, but I feel like this is a good starting point, especially when you think about hang on tree stands, which are generally my go to type of stand for private ground that I can set up beforehand. I realize though, that a lot of folks are leaning on ladderstands these days, which makes sense and is a topic that I plan to dive in on for next week’s episode, So come back in a week because I’m going to keep talking about how to haunt America’s favorite game animal. That’s it for this show. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. You guys show up for us with every project we do is truly incredible. If you need some more mediator content, you know where to go. The meediater dot com. New films, new podcasts, new articles, news on conservation, whatever, it’s all there. Go check it out and thank you once again
Read the full article here