Ep. 721: Foundations - Deer Hunting Single-Point Failures

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episode now. While our Southern hunting brothers and sisters might still be experiencing lots of rut, anticipation, and excitement, many of us are looking at the reality of the situation as it is now. The rut, for the most part, is functionally over. Sure, you can chase the second run in a couple of or you could spend your time setting I don't know, unicorn traps probably have similar results. This week, it's a time for reflection and a time to think long and hard about what went wrong on

your hunts. So buckle up, my little ombres, because it's time to think about failure. All right, you guys, know that I'm a space nerd. I fly that flag loud and prout, and even though Mark tries to make fun of me for it, we all know that space is ten billion times more interesting than pollinators or whatever weird

shrub fetish the old mustachioed madman has. I don't remember when it was, and I'm too lazy to dig through my archives, but at one point I released a Foundations episode that was based around the building of the James Web Space Telescope and how they got into space, which was no small feet. It took a huge team of people way too smart to spend their free time sitting in a Camo diper seventeen f feed up in a tree,

trying and mostly failing to kill a deer. One of the interesting things about the process for building that telescope, which has allowed us to image galaxies that are as far away as about thirteen point four billion light years, or to frame that up, take thirteen point four billion times six trillion if you want to know how many miles away that is. This telescope, which is a one of a kind. And I mean, after all, you couldn't just send the blueprints to China or some other manufacturing

nation and expect them to turn these suckers out. It literally is a one of a kind thing. This thing was decades in the making, and it's a piece of finely tooed scientific instruments that could fail in so many different ways. That's not even addressing the big one, which is just getting it into space. Rockets and their highly flammable rocket fuel occasionally explode long before delivering their payloads

into space. Now, when something like the James Web Space Telescope gets into space, it's not a time to cheer too loudly just yet. Due to the size of it and the design, this thing had to be folded up and built to unfold and unfurl while it took a million mile journey to its final destination in space. There, it had to finish unfolding and unfurling, and then calibrate several mirror panels while also cooling off to a temperature that will allow it to image infra red light without

any interference. I can't imagine the anxiety of being involved with that, mostly because the entire thing was built with three hundred and forty four single point failures. If any of those three hundred and forty four failures happened, the results were pretty severe and would disrupt the mission. In this case, from the super thin sunshield spreading out like wings to the honeycomb shape primary mirror that is coated with gold and looks pretty bad ass. Things had to

go perfectly right. If one of those three hundred and forty four had gone wrong, it's very likely that we would have launched a ten billion dollar paper weight into space. This is the nature of single point failures, but doesn't address them completely. A failure at one point might not necessarily mean a direct end to the functionality, but it would mean that other single point failures were about to happen.

That's the old casgating failures concept. I know this sounds like a giant roll of the dice with a lot of taxpayer money involved, but the truth is the team that designed this deep space observer left as little two chance as possible. They weren't just crossing their fingers that it would work. They built in redundancies when they could, and were very diligent about testing and retesting the whole thing in a lab before shooting it off into space.

It worked even when the odds seemed like they were way way stacked against the whole project. This, my friends, is kind of like the odds of going out on any given city and killing a big buck or a medium sized buck, or if it's anything like my season, a dough. There are single point failures in deer hunting, and they all have an opportunity to take us from deer hunting heroes to zero's real fast. Let me tell you about two that recently happened to me to frame

this whole thing up. A couple of weeks ago, I drove to the great state of North Dakota to try to arrow a public land buck. The spot I walked into is one that I hunted for a few days in twenty nineteen. Now I sat there for those days and I killed a great buck. You know, it's a pinch point along a river, and it's prime spot for bucks traveling during the rut. I figured, with the massive cold front we had and the general lay of the land, it would sort of be a done deal before too long.

And honestly, the first year I saw after a few hours of sitting was a very solid eleven pointer he walked into twenty six yards, and when my cameraman finally had a clear view, I realized I was about to kill a big, big public land buck on my very first sit. It was one of those shots where the buck was totally relaxed. He was just munching on acorns,

and I had all the time in the world. Now, I remember my pin being right on his vitals, and when I hit the release, it should have been all over, but what it sounded like was a very loud twang, and I watched a very healthy deer run away. I still don't know for sure what went wrong, but upon many many replays of the whole thing, it's clear that

my string caught on something. And listen, I was all bulked up because it was really cold and super windy, and I just didn't have the clearance I needed for that shot angle. That's a single point failure. It was sad, but it got a lot sadder as I was recapping the miss with the camera, and halfway through the cameraman's eyes bugged out and he said, big buck right there. I turned around and found out that he was not lying ten yards away looking at me was a really

good buck. He wanted to get past us, but he wasn't sure since he knew there were two dudes in the tree right next to him. When he looked away, I drew, and when he started to move, I did something really, really dumb. I quietly murped him in my head. I thought he was leaving, so I tried to buy myself an extra two seconds to aim and shoot. But he was super close, and he was on edge, and he wasn't having none of that shit. Single point failure

number two, dumb, dumb, dumb. The ones that come directly from our brain and influence our actions through an encounter are the hardest to address, So I'm going to get to them later. Right now, I want to address some of the single point failures that just don't need to happen. I've been hunting cold weather white tails since I could hunt, and when that big eleven point came in, I just bulked up and closed. I had never worn before. I drew on stand, but I didn't really check my string clearance.

I didn't think I needed to do. You know how dumb that was, Because I do. That's a single point failure you can address so easily. Another one might be just how loud your stand and stick set up is, or if you aren't going mobile, how loud your setups are in general. Do you have a ladder stand that always pops super loudly when you climb in. Does it have those loose d clip things holding a ladder together

that are always making noise? Have you climbed in there when it's sixty degrees and when it's ten degrees because there might be a difference. One of the things I did this year when I had to hunt with Steve Ranella down in Oklahoma was it I bought a bunch of extra random stuff like toe ropes. I didn't know if he or the camera guys would have the right stuff for tree stand hunting, so I picked up some extra stuff just in case that you always need on

every hunt. And the toe ropes I bought, they all have little metal carabiners on them. And you know what happens when you're swinging ropes with little metal carabiners on them around, They ping off other metal pieces of gear. Why we think we need constantly improve on good old no metal rope is beyond me. Why I use that

stuff when I know better is also beyond me. Now that might not be a single point failure in the realm of a ruining a hunt type of thing, But why risk it sitting a spot with the wrong wind. Now that's a single point failure, that's a big one. But it isn't as simple as the wind blowing right to where you think the deer will be. Of course, that will derail your plans most likely, but too perfect of a wind probably will too, at least in certain

setups that aren't on movement funneling locations. If the deer have the option to get the wind in their favor when they travel, they almost always will. Now, if that's the case on your perfect wind setup, your wind actually might not be as good as it seems. You probably know plenty of issues we often have with gear and

with where we choose to hunt based on conditions. But do you know what the source of most of our hunting single point failures is our brains, which have a tendency to function it less than optimal when a deer we want to shoot makes its presence known. The problem with this is that we feel like we need to make something happen. That little mirp that I gave that second North Dakota buck, it was a huge single point failure. It literally cost me that deer, and I have no

one to blame but my own dumb ass. I'll never forget my good buddy telling me a story about hunting with a cousin of his, Like fifteen years ago. My buddy was running a camera and his cousin was running a bow. So as soon as they saw a good buck walking their way in the woods, my buddy started filming. What surprised him was hearing his cousin shuffle around and then suddenly bang his rattling antlers together. That buck looked up, said ah, hell no, and turned around. Now let me

explain this. That buck was walking in naturally, he probably knew there weren't two big bucks about to square eye sixty yards in front of him. You got the hunter panicked and try to make something happen. Single point failure, and man, that's a doozy closing time. Not when the bars are shutting down, but when it's time for you to seal the deal on a deer or where a hell of a lot of single point failures come into play. This is one of the reasons I'm pretty sick of

trophy hunting. Honestly, I know we all want to kill big bucks, but you'll never be good at that unless you get good at killing does and little bucks. There's no jump in the line on this one. And I'm sorry to tell you that the process of ranging a deer and finding the exact moment to draw, using the right pin or dialing in correctly, and then if you have to stopping the deer to execute the shot man, any of those things can go wrong, and when they do,

most of the time, the whole thing's over. What compounds that issue is that if you take some time to figure out how to shoot four ky's and two year olds, they may let you know some of those single point failures slide that a mature deer just wouldn't. And on that note, let me tell you something else. It's often harder to earn a really good shot opportunity and see it through on a mature dough than a mature buck

in high pressure areas. A mature dough will just not tolerate your failures, and she's never going to be out of her mind crazy with lust like her boyfriend might be. Remember that in your process to become a better deer hunter. Now, the more you work through a complex ripe for disaster situation like trying to shoot a deer with a pointy stick. The easier it becomes for you to engineer a scenario where all of those single point failures remain unfailed. That's

not a word. I'm a writer, I swear, although I am an outdoor writer. So the story kind of tracks. Of course, long before you get a shot. You might have set yourself up for a single point failure that you don't even understand. I've talked about this a few times, but recently witnessed it in the northern Wisconsin. And I'll tell you what laziness in general is your enemy. It's a breeding ground for single point failures. You know, from hunting easy stands to just not really scouting to you

name it. But one area where it's obvious to me is in where you park your vehicle. I have a neighbor to one of my Wisconsin properties who has forty acres. The front half is a hayfield and the back half is part high woods and part swamp. I'm just making an educated guess here, but he's probably hunting the high woods which borders the Field's a strip of cover that's maybe one hundred yards wide from the look of it. On on x now when I was there, hunting my

property next to his. Couple weeks ago. I saw his truck part right on the edge of that high woods, right on the edge of the open hayfield during the rut. Here's the thing about that, Any deer that comes into that field is going to spook because that truck is only there when he hunts. Any deer that sees that truck through the woods, he's probably gonna spook or get edgy.

And sure that might just be alone dough that's coming through that freaks out a bit or a little spike, but those negative reactions tend to change the vibe of the woods. What's worse is that forty acres is roughly four hundred yards by four hundred yards. If he parked down the road and walked in, it would maybe tack on an extra ten minutes, but would almost guarantee a different better hunt. To me, that's a single point failure. That's just kind of unacceptable. And yes, he can walk

just fine. He's younger than I am and not suffering from some degenerative disease or recovering from a nasty skydiving accident. Now, I recently did a podcast with Mark where we talked about this quite a bit. And the truth is, while I disagree with Kenyan on a lot of things, like the proper facial hair for a man, he's right about how he thinks through hunting scenarios before he sets up. He's kind of a what can go wrong, probably will

go wrong kind of hunter, and I am too. This is because there are hundreds of variables during every one of your hunts that is way beyond your control. What is in your control are hundreds of other variables that

you should consider with most of your setups. I think this might be the biggest white tail single point failure out there, which is not really considering how many things can go wrong and not making a valiant effort to at least curb the most obvious ones, you know, the easiest ones to address, so to speak, because really, becoming a consistently successful white tail hunter is just kind of a war of attrition against your own ignorance and bad habits. If that sounds too harsh, let me put it in

a different way. Personally, I'm always fighting my own laziness and my own second guessing. I'm constantly pulled toward easy setups when I know that a little extra work is almost always a better strategy. Experience teaches you the best way to do this stuff, but it doesn't totally erase our desires to shortcut the whole process and just kind of phone it in. But when we do that, that's not where the rewards come from, and it's mostly a

recipe for frustration. A better bet that seems, you know, like less fun because it's more work, is to just put in the effort, think through what you're doing and why you're doing it and what can go wrong if X, Y or Z happens. You don't have to overthink it to the point of vapor locking your brain, but you should consider, you know, what are some of the biggest single point failures you've dealt with, and try to figure

out how to mitigate them. Now, eventually some of the issues that constantly plag other hunters will be nothing more than a distant memory for you, and you can work on more problems. This is a good strategy for life. Honestly, take care of something little and let that good habit snowball into something else, because if we go the other way, the single point failures might stack up into those cast gating failures, and that is not a fun place to be.

Think about this and think about coming back next week, because I'm going to talk about muzzle or hunting and why I think it's the best opportunity for bow hunters who want a little extra firepower on their side while they hunt a season that most other hunters just don't care a whole lot about. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for listening and so

much for your support. As I mentioned in the beginning, Mediator has a monster sale going on right now. Head on over to the site. You'll see tons of stuff marked way way down, and if you want more content. While you're there, you can check out articles written by me, Mark, guys like Bo Martonic, Alex Gilstrom, Addamore, whole bunch of really good whitetail hunters. And you can find all of our other podcasts and a whole bunch of video series over there at the mediatter dot com. Go check it out.