Ep. 640: Foundations - Avoiding Overlooked Hunt Planning Mistakes

planning our over the road whitetail months. Last week I covered the fine tuning aspects of really taking your ambush sites to the next level, and I think that's something in the deer game. It just doesn't get a whole lot of love, but should and I think March is a great month to do that kind of stuff. I also think it's a great month to start working on

your over the road whitetail trips. Now, we all know about some of the stuff involved in this right, like researching tags and e scouting, but there's a hell of a lot of other details that don't seem all that important now until you get like six hours down the road and start setting up camp somewhere, and that's what I'm going to talk about this week with my friends.

Last year, one of our neighbors walked past our house with her little boy and a puppy, And when you have twin girls in middle school, a fresh puppy sighting is pretty big news. Now, the next time that neighbor walked by, we all went outside to greet the new dog. It was an eight week old doodle of some sort. Now, I'm a dog guy, so I love most canines, even the ones that don't really have a job quite like a I don't know, a German short hair or a lab.

Might this pup, Lola, she wasn't meant to be a worker, only a good family dog, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I don't know. Without sounding like too much of an ass, I'm usually pretty suspicious of popular breeds. I've talked about this a lot, so I won't go into it too much. But in the dog world, breeds rise and fall in popularity, and that means demand rises, and when it does, prices go up and folks try to

bulk up the supply by producing more puppies. Now, if this is a fidget spinner or something, I guess it's not a big deal, but if it's a living, breathing animal that has to be bred in a certain way, it certainly can be. The doodle craze, just like the Golden retriever craze in the seventies and eighties, or more recently, the French bulldog or Belgian malinoa craze, tends to create

some questionable breeding. Now people hear about pups going for three or four grand a pop or more than they do the math on the average litter size, and pretty soon they are shopping for private islands and yats. But breeding just to produce more dogs of a certain breed often has disastrous effects on health and temperament. This is not much different than breeding for a certain color of

dog or a specific look. When you place esthetics as more important than health or simply quantity of pups over quality, bad results are on their way. Unfortunately, those bad results often don't show until the checks are cashed and the dog has wormed its way into the family and a few years to have passed since the puppy purchase. Now, I'm not saying you can't get an amazing dog in a popular breed or that you couldn't end up with

an incredible elaborator retriever. Even if your primary criteria when looking for one is that you want a brown dog or a red one. You certainly can. I'm just saying it's a buyer beware situation if you're going after a super popular breed without digging into the bloodline. Well, our neighbor didn't do that, and I don't blame her. She didn't know any better. And she also had a plan to train the dog, which sounded pretty good when she

told me about it. She had the pupp enrolled in classes at a dog training center, she had bought plenty of puppy training supplies, and it all sounded pretty good on paper. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I was heading down the road to shovel my neighbor's driveway during the nine hundred and seventeenth blizzard of this winter. It was then fighting the stupid, dumbass snow that I hate with a fury of ten thousand sons that I realized I hadn't seen my neighbor with the pupp in

quite a while. One quick text later, and I found out that she became too much to handle and they had to give that puppy away. This isn't an uncommon story in the dog world, but it is one that could often be avoided with better and more honest planning. And it's not really unlike hunt planning in a few ways. First, there is the big that has to be right, otherwise you're in trouble. This would be where you're planning to go, how to get a tag, and how you'll eat scout

or boots on the ground scout your location. That's big stuff, right. Compare that to doing some due diligence on a dog breeder to really understand what kind of a dog you're potentially going to buy. Not breed, mind you, but what kind of a healthy dog should it be? How smart should it be, How athletic, how stubborn, how much prey

drive these kind of things. With hunt planning, we devote a lot of time to the big stuff, the big questions, the sexy stuff, like how we should probably hold out for a one fifty plus since we're going to be hunt in southern Iowa and it's loaded with giants, or how much easier it is going to be to leave Georgia and drive up to Ohio to kill a Midwestern toad.

We romanticize the trip and we shoot a lot. We book our vacation, we daydream, We immerse ourselves in the notion of what are hunt will go like, and we don't look back. People do this with dogs, especially with puppies. We think about how fun it will be to always kill a limited roosters, or always have a well behaved buddy in the house that will snuggle up to us every night. But this glosses over so much of the

reality that we are often blindsided by it. Now, one of the things that people often get wrong with hunt planning is how difficult it is to go someplace new and kill a deer, let alone a good buck. It's just hard, really hard, even in places with high deer densities plenty of land rome. Now you might be thinking, how does acknowledging how hard and over the road hunt

will be help me plan the hunt better? Well, you're a smart cookie to question that the thing is hunting deer is more academic than most of us want to admit. You rarely encounter really dumb people who are good at white to hunting. Simply recognizing reality and how difficult of a task be helps you get prepared mentally. This is something that might seem overblown in white tail circles, but

is well understood amongst Western hunters. If you think packing a bowl elk out of the mountains isn't going to test you, you're probably way wrong. Hell if you think any average elk hunt isn't going to cause you to think about your life choices in a not so great way at one point or another, you're probably way wrong. If you know that going into it, Hell, I know for months ahead of it that you'll get your mental

gear squared away. That's important. It's not so hard to climb a mountain when you've been planning and preparing for it, both physically and mentally for a long time. For the white tail hunter, there won't be too many mountains to climb, but there will often be stands to hang, bluffs to climb, rivers to cross, camp to set up and tear down, and lots of shitty weather to sit through. And to be fair, depending on where you hunt, there actually might

be some mountains to climb. Now. I'm not saying you should focus solely on the negatives, because that's stupid, but you should be aware of how many of them you'll encounter and build in some contingencies for them. An easy one here is to focus on two regions or two spots and your pre hunt planning. Now you know you want to go to a specific piece of public land in Illinois, for example, that you read about on bow hunting forums, and those internet strangers told you that the

big bucks are there. The habitat is so thick only the strongest and the toughest hunters even enter it, and any hunter worth his or her salt should easily be able to kill a pope and young buck there if they have enough time here in the rut. So you laser in, you figure out where you're going to camp. You have a few stands and a saddle ready to go. You drop a pile of weight points on ruddy looking hot spots and you figure, I don't know, it's just

a matter of time on stand. Then you get there and you realize that about forty three other hunters must have read the same forum thread. You see that the habitat is just woods. It's not a jungle, it's not prohibitively thick. It's just some good old deciduous forest, the kind that I don't know. Just about any random hunter could walk through just fine. Thank you. Okay, that's a setback, but you're going to outwork the competition, so you start

sneaking into spots you've marked. They look okay, but after a few days you realize that the deer are either not really there or they aren't really where you're hunting, and the pressure is intense. The rut is the opposite of intense, and the prospect of not only failing to fill your tag, but really having a whole lot of fun trying to do it is very real. What do you do If you don't have a backup plan, You probably keep slapping the ass of that dead horse and

wondering why it just won't gallop anywhere else. If you have a well planned backup spot, you move plain and simple, pull up camp, hit the road, and go to your life raft spot. This might seem too simple, but the truth is getting married to one spot is no bueno.

I don't know how many times I've driven to some state to hunt public land only to find that my original research was just lacking in some aspect, an aspect that made me either not enjoy the hunt or made me think I wasn't in the game at all, which not coincidentally, is really unenjoyable. Now, it's important to note that sometimes you can't go all that far away. If you drew a license for specific unit in a state, you're gonna have to stay in that unit. But even

then you need a backup. Even if you only relocate a half hour or an hour away, the world can all change for you. Now. If you can hunt a whole state or a good portion of some state, then having a couple of hours between your Plan A and Plan B is a real good idea. Driving one hundred or two hundred miles to a backup spot kind of sucks, but it puts you in a different mindset. And if you've planned for this reality, it's not that big of a deal considering how much you have at stake for

an over the road hunt. Do yourself a favor and give yourself a real backup option that you have confidence in it. And I'm talking about planning this now. Then drill down some of the hunt details that you might be overlooking. A good example of this is food. Last year I did a few episodes where I talked about my food strategy. But I'll borrow something from the elk world to highlight this in a new way. If you go on your first elk hunt, you undoubtedly research food options,

and if you don't, your bananas crazy. Since weight is everything to the elk hunter, carrying in light food that is full of calories is kind of a must. This leads us to freeze dried just add hot water kind of meals that are just what you take. They make

the most sense. But it also leads us to read about elk hunting superstars and their strategies, which might be to eat I don't know, almond butter packets all day long, or take bagels and slather them with peanut butter and layer them with strips of bacon, and wallah, you have five thousand calories for each day. That don't wait too much.

But then on day three your hunt, you realize your freeze dried meals are waging war on your intestinal track and you could ship through a screen door from ten feet away at pretty much any moment of your choosing and often not really a moment of your choosing. Or you realize you don't really like baggels with peanut butter and bacon for one meal. Let alone twenty one in

a row. You have to find the stuff you want to eat, the stuff that won't make you feel like you just got bitten by a zombie in the Walking Dead. Plan your food for your trips appropriately so that you aren't all that miserable or driven to visit the closest burger king every day, which might not be that close at all. And what about the things you need to make food? Do you have a tote with a propane

stove in it? How about some dishwasher soap and a scrub or cleaning up afterwards, spatch a can open or toothpicks, a cutting board. What do you need for your trip to have the right kind of meals? And how about your vehicle? I used to drive a truck that just didn't have a very big gas tank. I think it was twenty four gallons. I always carried five gallons of extra fuel just in case or I don't know. Have you ever had a flat tire on a road trip?

It sucks. It happens quite often on hunts because the kind of roads you're driving in and pulling into campgrounds and whatever else. Do you have a can of fix a flat in there? I know This is probably a dumb question for a lot of people who listen to this, but do you know how to change a tire? Have you ever done it on a muddy road in a rainstorm at eleven at night in a state that is not your home state? What's the status of your spare? What do you bring along on your hunt that requires batteries?

I try to use headlamps and lighting for my camp that utilize the same size of batteries because it's simpler. That usually gets me to like a bulk package of double ais and triple as that ride around in the center console in my truck all season long. This saves my ass more often than I care to admit, from just general ease of camping to blood trailing issues. Do you have a way to organize all the little stuff

that makes up a hunt? Release aids, tow ropes, gloves, hats, whatever else would easily be available and easy to find at home, but you kind of need to plan for it when you travel. What about drying out your gear if you get stuck in the rain if you are in a motel, how will you do that? What about in a tent? What does your boot situation look like? Do you just need a pa or a knee high rubber boots, or you're gonna go hike for miles a

scout and might need a pair of good leathers. How about first aid bandages, moleskin for blisters, a little superglue to take care of the cuts from mishandling a broadhead while you drank your seventh jack and coke of the night. Do you have some aspirin carabineers for your safety harness. A good way to start getting ahead of this stuff is to make a really comprehensive list of everything you use to hunt at home. Then invest in a couple

of totes. Then make a list of the camping essentials you need or the stuff you need to get by for a week in a roach motel pack efficiently and check that list off as you go. Is there something new you want to buy for the trip, like say a tent. If so, buy that some bitch and then set it up in your yard. Know what you're getting into with it or I don't know, you're sleeping bag or you're cot or whatever. Long before you stash it in the back of your truck and head out for

your ruttion. I know this sounds like a pain in the ass, and you could probably just wing it and be fine. You can. I've killed deer on all kinds of hunts, and believe me, I wasn't super prepared for all of them. When the girls were little in my time was as limited as my sleep. I forgot all kinds of stuff. When I headed on trips, I stayed intense, I hated. I've dealt with a pile of flat tires in remote places, and I've grinded out some victories when

it wasn't likely. But I've also taken a couple of els along the way too. I suffered a lot due to my own stupidity and lack of preparation. There's nothing worse than meeting the consequences of your own actions or

in actions at any time in life. But it really stings when it's on that trip you've been daydreaming about for months, and then you realize it could go much better, that it could be much more enjoyable, and you could have a better chance of running an arrow through a really good deer if you had just covered a few more of your bases in the pre trip planning stage, a stage that goes all the way back in time to right now, when it's far more likely you're thinking

about turkey hunting or maybe crappie fishing than deer hunting.

But just like the eight week old adorable puppy that mostly sleeps before it eventually turns into a disobedient, toothy nightmare at nine months old and over the road, whitetail trips seems so simple and so full of promise in the spring, but it can be a vastly different thing come late in November when it hasn't stopped raining for three days and the rut fields non existent, and eating soggy turkey sandwiches with no mail because you forgot it

at home sucks. Don't let that happen. Start your planning now and really get into the details of what you'll need to be happy and successful, and tune in next week when I plan to talk about where bucks live and travel and how you can find those spots. Right now, that's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought you by first Light. As I always thank

you so much. If you want more white tail content, head on over to thum meat eater dot com, slash wired and you can read all kinds of articles from myself, Mark, Alex gilstrom Andy May, Dylan Tramp, Bomartonic, whole bunch of white tail Killers, all kinds of good information there. Please go check it out