You will notice light blue circles on every general location we hunted D14 from the rifle opener to the last week. I've learned since that my scouting was not sufficient. The first place we scouted, and subsequently hunted during opening morning, was out west of Mountain Home Village. We had found water, trails with tracks, and scat (although I'm not sure how fresh it was). We never really set eyes on any deer during our scouting, but knew that they would be in for water or cool, shady beds at sometime. Come opening morning there were at least two other groups of hunters who had pushed up the valley, past our "watering hole" where we were camo'd in. If deer were going to come to our little watering hole, they weren't now. The hunters cut them off by their presence and left us with nothing. I spoke with them afterward, and they did see a small herd of does, but no bucks. Were those our deer we were waiting for? Most likely. Lessons learned: Scout like you hunt or at least until you see something and know where it's going and when. Go where the hunters are not. Seems simple.
The second place I scouted during the summer were the hills above Silverwood Lake. It was here I discovered the problem with using Google Earth and hunting D14 in general. The hills are way steeper than they appear and the brush in lower elevations (below 6,000) is so dense as to be mostly impassable. If it was not a hiking, or extremely well used game trail, I could get nowhere. All I did was road scout this area for the most part. We did see a doe crossing the road on the way down, however, we never hunted the area.
Resuming opening day, I remembered what I had read that deer go up in hot weather and down in cold and nasty weather. We went up the mountain. We went to the Jenks Lake/Barton Flats area along with dozens of our fellow venison enthusiasts. They, like me were "road hunting" in late morning desperation. Road hunting, in as much as you are driving around looking for deer activity off the roadsides, is fine at that. Most hunters know that shooting from a vehicle, especially on a road is extremely illegal. I'm sure most of those guys knew that. What they may not been aware of is that the area of Jenks Lake is right on the border of two shooting zones. BLM Shooting Zones (D14). SBC Shooting and Hunting Areas (The maps are from BLM. They're the same map, but the 1st one is zoomed and cropped for D14.) If you look at the maps, the yellow areas are where you can hunt with a rifle, and the blue areas are shotgun or bow only. The maps don't have small roads on them, and therefore, it's very difficult to know exactly where you can get yourself in trouble or not in those border areas like Jenks Lake. If anyone has better shooting zone maps, PLEASE SHARE!
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