Has anyone ever hunted on this ranch? If so, what did you think about it. I am considering a hunt there.

I just returned from hunting whitetail on this 4,500 acre high fenced operation 20 miles or so out of Abilene and I'll be hard pressed to ever hunt a high fenced operation again. I doubt very seriously that I would even consider hunting this particular operation again.

The place is marketed as a whitetail bow hunter's dream. The deer can be hunted only with a bow. There certainly are a significant number of 140 plus deer on the property, or so the game cam pics would lead one to believe that, but the land is not managed for the bow hunter.

At $140 a day to hunt it is an expensive proposition to spend any time on the property and it takes time to determine the best areas to hunt. Also, once there you are assigned a particular area of the property to hunt. The plus of that is you don't have to worry about someone else walking into your area. The down side is you are limited in terms of using food/water/cover as determining factors as to where you would hunt.

There are a good number of food plots and feeders and plenty of dense cedar thickets to hunt. The food plots, however are 20 and 30 acres in size and a ground blind is the only way to hunt them. Being set up at the right place at the right time is almost impossible. Most of the feeders are set up in the middle of the food plots so you've got a long shot to anything that happens to show up.

The property is loaded with elk and buffalo, both of which feed on the food plots, keeping whitetail away. I saw plenty of both and not nearly as many deer as I would have liked.

There is a 115 inch minimum for shooting a buck. That is very understandable for management reasons. However, I saw bucks in early light that I had a really hard time estimating on the hoof. Shooting a sub-115 buck carried a very stiff financial penalty so passing was the only real option. I had bucks that were just shy of the 115 standard within bow range but nothing over. Out of six hunters over two days of hunting only one of us saw a 115 plus buck within bow range and there was no shot option afforded.

Bottom line for me is this: The operators want you to see lots of deer but they don't want you to shoot any deer. Everything is set up to accomodate the seeing of deer but very little is done to make the taking of a buck a reasonable expectation.

For whatever its worth!

Good post and sounds like a very bad experince. that really bites the bigone. Did you tell them how you felt.

Thanks, Jason, and I did share some of my concerns. I did not "unload" on anyone as that rarely accomplishes anything. They are not going to change the way they manage property because one bow hunter wasn't pleased. It is a self-guided hunt so I have to accept a lot of responsibility for finding, or failing to find, quality deer. I don't know if this is the standard for high fenced operations but I won't be doing it again.

It sucks but some people just dont care about there hunters it is the turn over thay want. 4500 acers is a lot land to hunt. It is hunting but not having any kind of chance to harvest somthing is crazy.