Colorado Mule Deer Landowner Tags

Colorado Mule Deer Tags or deer vouchers are also available here at Hunters Domain in many of the Colorado Trophy Mule Deer Units such as Colorado Unit 02 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 10 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 11 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 21 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 22 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 30 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 40 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Units 41,42,421 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 43 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 44 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 52/521/411 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 54 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 60 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 61 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 62 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 70 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 71 / 711 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 711 / 71 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 72 / 73 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 73 / 72 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 444 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 133 Mule Deer Colorado Unit 136 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 143 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 142 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 441 Mule Deer, Colorado Unit 214 Mule Deer Hunting & Colorado Landowner Tags, Colorado Unit 211 Mule
Deer.Colorado Mule Deer Guides and Outfitters can be found here on HuntersDomain.com to help you fill any deer tag you may have drawn or purchased or the state of Colorado.Colorado Trophy Mule Deer Hunting is at a peak now and will remain there with the continued help from Colorado Division of Wildlife and Mother Nature providing those much needed spring rains to help in trophy mule deer antler growth.

Information for landowner tags for Colorado deer

High- Country Muleys

Early bow seasons can be the best mule deer hunting of all – if you know how to play the game. Here’s how:

It was a glorious night, cold and clear, with so many stars so close it seemed like I could reach out and pluck one from the sky with my fingertips. The only sound was the rustling of the wind in the trees and the beating of my heart. I was 19 years old and had just spent a week climbing around the high peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada range, bow hunting mule deer bucks. I had found them, too, but my stalking skills were as rough around the edges as a piece of broken glass, and I never got a shot.

But brother, I was hooked! I had found the deer early in the year, before the gun hunters had chased them all over the place, and in addition found something just as important both in terms of my chances for success and my soul – solitude. In the 30 years since that fall, I have bow hunted early-season, high-country mule deer a lot and have yet to find anything that brings me more pleasure and more inner satisfaction, regardless of whether or not I punch my tag. And just as often as not I eat tag soup, because even though I have learned how to find the deer, putting it all together and getting a shot at a high-quality buck remains one of the most difficult bow-hunting challenges on the planet.

Early Versus Late Hunting

There are two prime time periods to bow hunt mule deer in the mountain country of the West – early and late.

The early season, depending on the state, generally runs from mid-August through mid-September. It is characterized by long, sunny days punctuated at times with raucous afternoon thunderstorms. Temperatures are relatively warm, and the high alpine bowls are as beautiful as anyplace on earth, filled with lush green grasses highlighted by a kaleidoscope of multihued wildflowers.

The deer act differently than they will later on, during the general and late gun seasons. The general rifle season usually takes place in October, after the bucks have shed their velvet but before they have begun to rut. The bucks are loners now, or matched up in pairs or small groups, and can be tough to locate, especially if you’re looking for the older patriarchs. The weather is mixed, bringing both hot and cold and dry and wet days, or perhaps a little snow. The late season I define as early November until the season closes and is the antithesis of the early season. Temperatures have plummeted, the days are short, and snows are beginning to fall. Icy winds can blow off the polar caps, chilling you to the bone. But if you hit it right, the deer are beginning to rut, moving around a lot, and are relatively easy to spot.

It is the early season that defines high-country mule deer hunting for me though. In many cases, only archery or limited-entry muzzleloader hunting is permitted, which tends to thin out the crowds. In fact, you’ll find most early-season hunters these days are chasing elk, not muleys. In August and early September, the deer are still in velvet or have just scraped it off, living their lives in the alpine bowls as they gorge on the high-quality food necessary to develop their antlers and stock up their body fat reserves for the coming rut and subsequent winter. The deer can be found feeding early and late in the day in these bowls, often bedding on the edges in the late morning, moving into the deep shade of the dark timber or big cliffs when it gets too hot. There they nap the day away, heading back out to feed in late afternoon.

Mule deer bucks can still be found in the high country after the rifle seasons open in October too. However, once they lose their velvet and human pressure picks up a little, they tend to drop into the dark timber or thick brushy canyons and draws, emerging only on the very cusp of daylight – if they come out during daylight hours at all. Here they spend the rest of the early and midseason period, rarely leaving the sanctuary of this heavy cover. They can be very, very difficult to hunt at this time, especially for traveling bow hunters who do not know the terrain like their own backyards. The deer won’t leave this thick cover until the late season, when either the rut or deep snows – or both – force them out into the valleys below.

The Pocket Principle

Early-season bucks gather in small bachelor herds of between a few to a lot, depending on a variety of things. Usually these bachelor groups are comprised of deer within a year or two in age of each other. Yearling bucks rarely are found with the bachelor groups, instead living with small herds of does and fawns.

I was a starving college student in Sacramento, California, when I first bow hunted Nevada’s Ruby Mountains. Hunting the Sierra got me going, but that trip set the hook. At this time of year, the deer have an almost reddish coat that literally glows in the bright sunlight. I was glassing a giant bowl at the top of the peaks that must have been two miles across. In that bowl I counted 87 bucks scattered about in groups of between 3 and 15, all placidly feeding and enjoying the sunshine. The problem was, there were just too dang many deer! Every time I tried to make a stalk, there seemed to be another bunch of bucks in the way. I hunted for a week and never shot an arrow.

That’s the exception, an experience I’ve never duplicated. More common is backpacking into the high country, setting up camp and heading out in search of mule deer “pockets.” When you get into a new piece of country, by using your topographic maps then glassing the terrain, you’ll see several areas that just look “deery.” But you’ll soon find that the majority of these places don’t hold any deer at all. You’ll have to cover some ground and carefully glass many such areas before locating a bachelor herd of bucks. It is these small “pockets” that define high-country mule deer hunting in the early season.

I call it the “Pocket Principle.” It says that 95 percent of good mule deer country holds no deer at all. All the deer are found in isolated pockets, where they live all summer long.

A pocket can be one alpine bowl and a single patch of timber for cover and security. (In the flat lands of the plains, it might be a single draw or gully in an area streaked with them.) More likely it will be two or three adjacent bowls connected by saddles or strips of dark timber. The deer seem to like to move between these bowls on a semiregular basis, something I believe they do to keep from over-browsing a specific bowl.

One year my friend Dwight Schuh – now the editor of Bowhunter magazine – and I backpacked into the rugged Weimenuche Wilderness of Colorado in search of some bigger-than-average muleys. We covered 6 to 10 miles a day for nearly two weeks. In that time, we found four pockets of mule deer bucks. After a time, we could almost predict where they’d be every morning and every afternoon. Some days, one bunch would be in alpine bowl “A” feeding happily along. The next day that same bunch would have moved through a saddle to bowl “B.” The next day, they might be in bowl “C.” The next day, they were back in bowl “A.” They lived in an area of about two square miles. Meanwhile, we hunted an area around them of about 10 square miles and never found another bunch of bucks. If you are looking to hunt some mule deer, check out our Utah Mule Deer Huntingpage for more information.

Finding the Deer

Using topographic maps, you can pinpoint potential mule deer pockets before you ever get into the country. Look for fingers along the edges of timber, set up against the highest peaks and adjacent to bowls. I like to look for streams, too, although often the deer drink only from small seeps not found on any map. The north- and east-facing slopes usually get the most moisture during the year and therefore have the best food, so that’s where I always start my search.

Once in the country, I climb to a high vantage point before first light and glass the pockets I’ve located on my maps. If I see deer, great. If not, I glass other areas that just look good visually. By midmorning, if I don’t see anything exciting, I start covering ground, hiking and looking for standard deer sign like tracks, beds and so on.

When moving, take care to stay in the shade, and keep the wind in your face at all times. The last thing you want is your scent to spook unseen deer that may be bedded in the timber. I make a big circle from camp, glassing again from a high vantage point from late afternoon until it’s too dark to see, hiking back to camp with the aid of a flashlight.

If I don’t see any deer in a couple of days, I pack up camp and move several miles to another area my maps have told me has all the necessary ingredients and start the process all over again. Sooner or later I’ll find the deer. When I do, it’s time to begin hunting them in earnest.

High-Country Hunting

Generally speaking, it’s a spot-andstalk game. You locate deer, watch them go lie down for the day, then try and stalk them in their beds. You’ve all read about how to do this a million times, but there are variations on this theme worth considering.

Mini-drives between two hunters sometimes work. By patterning the deer, you can make an educated guess as to the trail they’re likely to take out of a bowl when spooked. Set one shooter up on the trail, and have the other try and herd the animals onto that trail. You have to drive “softly;” that is, just let the deer see you from afar, so they’ll move at a walk, not a panicked run. Sometimes, building a ground blind in the right spot is a good way to do business. I prefer stalking deer, simply because it’s more flexible, and I’m able to adjust by the minute as the deer dictate. But there are times when a stand is a deadly technique.

However you decide to go about it, keep in mind that it’s always best to hunt unobtrusively. By not making any rash moves, not carelessly stinking up the area with your scent and staying out of sight, you can hunt the same bachelor bunch of deer for a week or more without them being the least bit disturbed.

High-country mule deer hunting isn’t for everyone. Admittedly, you need to be in pretty good physical condition to take on the rugged peaks for a week or more at a time. And I don’t like heading into the back country for any less than a week. Every time I do, it seems as if about the time I’m finally into the deer, it’s time to go home. If you want to find great hunts, information and outfitters for Colorado deer hunts, see our Colorado GMU 2 Mule Deer Hunting page.

But the high alpine meadows in late August and early September are worth the price. And when you finally find that bachelor herd of a half-dozen mature bucks, with no other hunters in sight and a week ahead of you, you’ll believe it was worth it too.

By bob Robb

This article and many more like it can be found by Successful Hunter Magazine. Visit them at www.successfulhunter.com