Bonzi Badlands Scouting Trip

[mjoe79]

With the low deer population levels, I have been wanting to make a scouting trip for the past month to decide whether or not it would be worth taking some vacation time for a hunt. When I applied for the tag last winter, my old job had a schedule where I would get 8 strait days off once a month and I had 2 weeks vacation on top of that to use up. So finding time to go on a hunt wasn't going to be a problem. As luck would have it, the opportunity to make more money and work closer to home came along and it was too good to turn down. The only down side was that was going to give up my 8 off and no vacation to start out. Work has been really busy this whole month, every time I planed a couple days to go scouting I ended up being switched to a different crew. On Wednesday my following weeks schedule came out and I finally had a few days off and with the season starting in a week it was now or never. I got off of night shift, drove 2.5 hours home, took a half hour nap then packed my stuff and left for my 7 hour drive to my hunting area.


From previous scouting 2 years ago I wanted to first look at my #1 area. After a while of glassing from different vantage points and no deer spotted. I had 20 minutes of daylight left and drove 10 miles away to my #2 area and got lucky with a nice group of batchler bucks.

Picture quality is poor, camera ran out of battery juice and no spares so some of the pics are with my phone.

 

[mjoe79]

So the next morning I was up at my vantage point at first light at #2 area. Ended up seeing 10 bucks and a few does. The bucks were from deep forked 2x2's up to 4x4's. It seems most of the bucks I see in my area have weak back forks. I was very happy with the bucks I saw and figured I might drive some new roads and look at new country while heading back home. As I was starting to drive home, I was planning my route in my head and on the map. My original plan was to look at new country but I came to the road the leads towards my #1 area and decided to check it one more time. I am glad I did has he's a dandy.....

 

[mtmiller]

Nice, good luck when you get back over there with your bow in tow.

 

[Powerman777]

Ya the numbers are pretty low in the badlands right now. I think it is a combination between the increased number of mountain lions and blow up of the oil boom that is pushing the deer out. Where are you looking at going? Good luck!

 

[Duck-Slayer]

that decline is not good between the bad winters and all the people there now/oil boom, I don't forsee the numbers coming back until the people start too move out like they did on the last oil boom in what the 70's,
Matt