Congratulations Nice buck

Beautiful buck. Well done.

Yeah, what state, area? Looks like could be AZ or UT.

Kind of looks like Idaho, but it could be a lot of places.

Was somewhere in one of those states

Fantastic. Great buck. Beautiful country. Great pics. Great write up. Great effort by you.
All I need is some stats on the rack. He looks big enough to brag on so feel free.
Regardless of score, he certainly has a great look.

I haven’t scored him yet. Was going to do it this week.

We all think he will go in the mid 170’s

Mid 170s is great and he looks it.
What an all around great experience. Im not sure if Im too old but I sure think about something like that from time to time. I would actually prefer an MLD lease in Texas for big Mulies. I like the season long, every year experience.

Texas is going to become more of a mule deer destination as it’s pretty much the only state where populations are stable.

I’m a member of several mule deer groups on Facebook and if you look at the pics posted of bucks taken from the 50’s until the early 90’s compared to today, the quantity and quality has severely plummeted. Outfitter I hunted with said in the 80’s and 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to see 200” deer in the unit. Now that’s an outlier. Mule deer are suffering across the west and no one really knows why.

2nd chapter:

So the buck is down and we are over to him. As I mentioned previously, we were very ill prepared to actually kill a deer. We have no packs, no water and no gear. I'm the only one with a knife (an old bone handle knife I carry more for nostalgia than actual work). We did grab a radio as we got off the boat, so we radio back to base and bring them up to speed. There is a young buck on the boat so we tell him to grab our packs, a few bottles of water and an approx. location of where we are at. I can't say for sure how long it took him to make it to us, but we had already finished the photo session and started to break down the buck when he arrived some time later.

When he shows up, he has two packs, not three, one of them being a completely full pack that belongs to Micah. So we really only have one pack. We finish breaking the deer down and manage to fit all 4 quarters, back straps and tenders into the empty pack and Gibby gets to haul the deer off the mountain by himself and back to the boat. We hang behind to finish caping the deer off the skull, then capping him off. We roll the cape up and into Micah's pack and attached the rack to the back and start off down the trail.

For guys that have never been in the mountains before, walking downhill is almost as bad as walking uphill, and sometimes worse. Loose rock only complicates matters. I'm usually pretty good in uneven terrain but this is sucking. First ravine I slip and bust my arse, but no real damage done. Get to the next ravine and as I'm going downhill, my feet slip out from under me and I bust my arse again, this time falling on my rifle and sliding donw the hill....right into a cactus. I end up taking my rifle off my back and carrying it by hand down the mountain, now burdened by a dozen or so cactus thorns in my back. We get down to the trail and are making our way back to the boat when we come to a bottleneck with a brushy ledge on one side. As we pass by the brush erupts and a black figure emerges very quickly making oogie boogie sounds. Micah is scared half to death, I'm so tired I really don't react. The boat captain decided to get one over on ol' boy. He didn't think it was funny, we all thought it was hilarious.


Got back onto the boat and they spent the next 20 min digging cactus thorns out of my back

Well done, sir! Congrats!

Heck of a trip, congrats!

Dang! In total, quite the adventure, TX. Thank you for posting your story and your pics!

Some more pics.

Seeing the Gambels quail and more topography pics, leaning either northern AZ or Southern UT. Reveal Trophy, reveal...

Great scenery, nice animal, and good job, Congrats! Thanks for posting, it was a good read.

Awesome! Just awesome!

Great photos thanks for sharing.

How have hunter success numbers/#of harvests changed over the years the mule deer numbers have suffered? How about mountain lion/wolf numbers? Wolf restocking seems to be a hot topic.

Awesome pics!

Good question:

Overall, across the west, tag numbers, season length and hunter success has gone down across the board. Predators (big cats and wolves) certainly don’t help. This particular area the locals are hard on the big cats. Wolves so far are not really an issue.

Winterkill has taken alot of deer in certain years. Sometimes 50% of the herd, which takes years to rebuild.

Elk are also an issue to an extent as mule deer and elk don’t really coexist and elk have been steadily increasing in numbers. Logging or lack of it is playing a role as mule deer prefer open ground to heavy timber. Then there is the CWD topic.

Still, even the experts are somewhat puzzled and can’t put a definitive answer on what exactly is going on with the dwindling numbers.


To circle back to your original questions, western states have gone from being OTC and in some cases able to procure multiple tags a season, to OTC and shorter seasons, to Draw only units and shorter seasons, to in some cases, very limited draw and limited seasons.

There are still areas that hold good numbers of deer and have good quality, but it’s nothing like it was 50 or 60 years ago.

TX, what state Brutha, not the ranch or unit or whatever, just what state??

The state of mind? Well, it was South of Heaven, West of Hell

Man that was a great buck in beautiful vertical country. How was that pack out?

Congrats on a beautiful buck.

4W