Backcountry Hunting Gear Intro

Regardless of where or how one hunts, there is a certain amount of utility that can be enjoyed when hunting undisturbed animals, away from competition. My own preference is the places that simply take too long for most to hunt effectively. These places, many far from the boundaries of wilderness areas, are often visible from roads. The main requirement is travel time, if it can’t be reached in a reasonable amount of time it will simply be passed over for more accessible haunts. Think about it this way, if the sun is coming up at 6:00 am, and setting at 7:00 P.M., there are 13 good hours of daylight to work with. The normal hunter goes between 1 and 2 miles per hour when hiking off trail, a real animal can stretch it towards 3, occasionally even 4.

If a place is three or four miles distant, the normal competitor will take between an hour and a half and four hours to get there. And the same to get back. A slow goer will be putting in 13 hours of hunting and at least six of hiking. That leaves five hours to eat dinner, sleep, wake up and get dressed – plus the commute. I know a few gents that are up to this kind of grind, and can do it at an unrelenting pace- but it is something that is relegated to the double tough amongst us. While these guys are tough as nails, they can still be outperformed. For those willing to show up a little early and take a few extra pounds of gear, all the commuting is cut out of the equation. Instead of a grueling hike every morning and night is a cozy sleeping bag and a warm meal, with plenty of time left over to scrutinize the maps for a potential gold mine after the sun sets.

Packed right, a hunter can be comfortable, and have short hikes to glassing points, allowing all day hunting, more rest, and generally more success. A small camp will provide the requisite shelter, and a base to hunt out of for day hunts. This means that just about any hunter can take their time getting into the right country and hunt fresh every single day. So what does it take?

I break my gear into three main categories, life support, navigation, and hunting. Life support items include: clothing, sleep system, tent, food, water, and first aid. Navigation is crucial as it shows how to access the country, how to move within it, where to find water, and for a keen student of maps - where the animals should be. This includes a 7.5 minute topo maps, BLM or Forest Service maps, a compass, and a GPS. Hunting gear being the weapon of choice and extra ammunition or arrows, tripod, binoculars with a tripod adapter, and a spotting scope.

The next string of articles will deal with the categories, and the gear that comprises them, with the potential for some tangents into specific materials and situation specific recommendations. I will also include links to manufacturers that I feel make the right stuff for your further investigation. For many of these items, I can be contacted to round them up, as not only do I eat sleep and breath backcountry hunting, I am in the backcountry gear business.

Back at Babbitt's Backcountry Outfitters

After finishing my undergraduate career I spent the summer in Alaska, sans T.V. and with only sporadic Internet access. Now I am back in Flagstaff, AZ and have returned to Babbitt’s Backcountry Outfitters, one of Arizona’s oldest and best gear shops.

The new position will allow me to share more of the newest backcountry gear with you than I have ever been able to. While I have always tried to turn over new stones, this will allow me to see the gear as, and sometimes even before, it breaks to the public.

I hope that the combination of the backcountry gear side of my regular work, and my experience as a guide, backcountry hunter, and generally inquisitive person will help provide you with more tools to succeed in the woods into the future.

If there is something you are looking for in this genre, please don’t hesitate to call me at Babbitt’s at (928)-774-4775, and I will be glad to help point you in the right direction. If you are lucky enough to be hunting or hiking northern Arizona, stop in and bring your gear in if you are looking to cut weight, move faster, further, or just move better.

I look forward to meeting with you this fall, in the shop, or in the woods!

Writing for WesternWhitetail.com

I am changing the direction of this blog, or rather diversifying my venues. I have joined the guys at Western Whitetail to write a column on glassing and optics. Glassing has played an important part in virtually all of my hunting successes, and while it plays a well-known role in Coues deer hunting, the addition of these tactics to any western hunt produces results.

While I have been a big fan of Coues whitetail hunting for quite a while, the same methods that work well for us in the southwest work well for everyone that is serious about deer hunting. Since this outfit is focused specifically upon whitetail hunting, the articles and posts written there will cater more toward that specific genre. On their sight there are specific categories for Columbian whitetail, Coues whitetail, Carmen Mountain whitetail, and Texas whitetail– they have taken our most readily available game animal and placed the first real emphasis on hunting them in the West.

In the performance hunter blog, my emphasis will remain on general hunting technique improvement, gear selection, or anything that I find to help produce results for hunters in the field.

Westernwhitetail.com should prove to be a resource, particularly for those who haven’t yet learned the ropes in dealing with public land hunting, rules and regulations for access to US Forest Service, or Bureau of Land Management versus private ground like our Texas hunting brethren are accustomed to. The situations in each state are different and this resource for hunting the West - specifically for whitetail deer should prove to be an asset.

While some of my content may go to each location, I will do a better job of keeping this blog up to date with new equipment and effective use in the field, and I will keep you updated with the specific application of gear toward hunting the West for whitetails at http://www.westernwhitetail.com.

The methods you use to effectively glass an area need to be tied to two things, repeatability and the movement of the game. While you probably had a good idea about how animals move, using these techniques there will be some holes in the middle of the day that you will better understand now, and use more effectively during hunts or scouting trips. Now lets look at the mechanics for good glassing. The first thing to get across is that a consistent method should be used, many people call it a grid, the key is to pick country apart in an organized, repeatable manner. There are two primary platforms, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal glassing is akin to reading a mountain like a book, the majority of the movements made with your glasses are left to right or vice versa, with elevation adjustments being made a the extreme right or left edges of the area being glassed. Vertical glassing means the majority of movements being made are on an up and down plane, with left/right adjustments being made at the extreme top or bottom of those adjustments.

Different types of country dictate which method will be the most applicable. All pieces of ground are either horizontally or vertically oriented, for example, a ridge, the feature is wider than it is tall making it horizontal in nature, where a finger in a canyon is more vertically oriented, it is taller than it is wide. In country of a horizontal nature, vertical glassing movements will be the most productive; the shorter the planes of your movement the more apt you are to achieve full coverage and locate more animals. Just remember, all topographic features can be discerned as horizontal or vertical, and precise glassing dictates that your primary optical movements are perpendicular to the nature of whatever feature you are glassing.

Once a direction is established, the next step is to select a starting point, personally I prefer to begin at one of the extremes, top right or left, bottom right or left etc. There really isn’t a right or wrong place to start, but one point almost always jumps out at a you when you are setting up and no two people start at the same place. Once you start glassing, examine a field of view thoroughly, looking at every tree and branch on it, in the shadows, through the brush and of course in the open areas as well. Once you have picked apart that field of view, make your first movement, only ½ to 2/3 a field of view. This overlap ensures that country won’t be missed and is a mechanism to provide for repeatability and consistency. Continue this movement - either horizontal or vertical – until a discernable end feature is reached, be it a horizon, end of a ridge or edge of the basin you’re glassing. At this point make the logical adjusting movement and continue glassing. While one pass will likely yield results, continued, repeated examination is crucial because sometimes animals are feeding or bedded fully obscured from sight. With each pass you increase your odds of seeing everything that is in the piece of country you are examining. So where should you glass from, and what country should you glass?

The first time you glass country the goal should be to see as much country as possible from a single position. This allows you to scout as much ground as possible at one time, maximizing your ability to produce results. As specific areas produce more or better game, you know to hone in on them with future trips, finding glassing points that offer a vantage into a specific area of interest. With each return trip, you get closer and closer to the animals or specific animal you want to hunt and garner a greater understanding of them. With that knowledge you become more prepared for the hunt itself, knowing game movements specific to your area, so when the hunt comes your ambush point or a good glassing point that will provide for a short stalk to a shooting position will be located, making the hunt itself potentially more successful.

In almost every scenario, elevation is key. Some require only enough elevation to get above obscuring brush, others still require more elevation to maximize results. The best glassing points provide a view into the country you want to find game in. When you have a good glassing point, the trees don’t seem stacked upon one another, they appear somewhat spaced apart, meaning you are more able to find what is there. Hunting mule deer in Mexico for example, the ground is extremely flat, and while the 5 or 6-foot tall creosote is pretty sparse, over great distances it looks like an impenetrable wall. With elevation though, you would think that there is nowhere to hide a deer, much less a giant buck. In this country the further you will be looking, the higher you will need to be. On the other hand, when you’re hunting late season elk that are holed up in canyons, a good glassing point will likely be the opposing edge of the canyon, and likely a point on it that gets you out of brush and relatively close to the country you want to look into. The true goal is to find positions that provide a good perspective of ground that you want to look into, positions that limit the screening brush between you and what you want to see.

When you apply all these techniques you will find more game and gain a greater understanding of those animals. The point of all this is to find an animal that you want to take home, learn where it lives and what it does, then get into position for a stalk, and at the end of that stalk be in a position that provides not just a shot, but a high probability shot. Time spent glassing teaches you about the wind, animal movements, the path of the sun and most importantly, the way the country is laid out. This familiarity plays into the eventual success of a stalk. While it is a tool for finding game, it is also a tool for better understanding that game and increasing your odds of putting a tag on the animal that you want. From here, the next step is stalking, in it we will cover some mental elements: preparation and route planning; timing: when to go as well as how to move; and where to stalk to, a bow hunter has to stalk to an animal and a rifle hunter needs to stalk to a shooting position, these all require thought and planning. The better you understand and plan for these situations the more likely you are to be taking trophy photos when it’s all said and done

This is the end of the first big project I have undertaken. At this point, I have learned that the bites may well be better if taken in smaller amounts. Seeing that the late elk hunts on my home turf have already started, I wanted to get the last of this string of posts out for hunters to get to play around with this season. Good hunting!

A Good Bull, By Accident

While I've been working (slowly) on my glassing posts, I have a brief, fluke story to tell.

My hunting partner and I have been exceptionally lucky in the Arizona elk draws, but haven't been so lucky when it came to actually shooting the bulls we scouted. Dealing with lots of hunters had finally taken its toll on our hunting plans, last season he, his father and I all drew tags, and spent an entire season spotting and stalking bulls, it felt more like an archery deer hunt than an elk hunt, fun, but tough hunting all the way around.

Now I have to preface this story with the fact that all of us have significant hunting experience and have all killed good bulls, all through hard hunting.

This season, I decided to sign up for 18 credit hours at school. Most of these classes are in finance, so they're a bit more than a smidge over my head. I knew that I had to make my hunt happen as fast as possible to prevent a total failure of a semester, so I went in with the simple goal of shooting a bull. For the first time in my career, I wasn't trying to raise the bar; in all reality, I had set my sights lower than ever.

Day one was tough, running into a few other hunters in the field and not hearing my first bugle until near dark. I managed to see a couple small bulls, but was far from in position to get the job done.

On the second morning, I put a few miles on the Ford, hearing bulls at pretty much every stop. After making a big loop I picked a spot that was fairly close to town and the highway, so all the other hunters were driving right past it. I was pretty sure this would make for a good morning hunt, as I watched a decent bull trying to tend a cow in the middle of the road.

I bailed out of the truck and got right in on a bull, that lead me into several other elk. The first part of this morning was surprisingly busy, all I could do was try to sneak from one group to the next to see if I could get a sot on the bull. The end result was no, I couldn't poke a hole in any of the bulls I saw, or even get into range. But I remember thinking to myself on the way back to camp that it had been the most entertaining morning of elk hunting I could remember.

I rolled into camp fairly early, it just so happened that the show ended a little early where I was hunting. I figured I would take care of some chores around camp and get a fire started to enjoy a little morning coffee. Michelle, my hunting partner Jason's wife offered to put a pot on. All in all the day was starting off pretty good.

While I heard bugling from camp for the first ten minutes I was there, I couldn't let myself believe it was a bull. We had been surrounded by other camps, and I figured somebody was making noise from their camp. Then he starting chuckling, the sound was too "elky" so I grabbed my bow and took off at a trot.

The stalk took close to fifteen minutes. I stopped to check my wind when I realized there were two bulls firing off at one another, and one was right next to me. He started making a rub and I decided I would try to sneak in for a shot.

My attempted stalk lasted about three steps, he had started walking my way! Hearing his hooves hit the ground I backed into some shade and let him come in.

The bull came in to about 18 yards, bugled then turned for an opening in the trees, stopped to listen to the other bull, and I shot. I was less than a half mile from camp, after my morning hunt had ended and had just managed to shoot a bull.

Basic Animal Movements and Glassing

When it comes to glassing, animals are generally in one of three movement categories: feeding/watering, bedded, or transitioning from feeding/watering areas to or from bedding areas. At each of these times animals move at different rates. So the pace at which we glass should also vary. When animals are up and moving they are easier to see for two reasons; first, they are generally more exposed, the more of an animal you can see the more likely you are key in on recognizable features and notice it’s presence. Second, they are moving more, as movement increases so does the likelihood that the passive element of the eye will detect that movement triggering the recognition of that animal. At these times beginners will even find high success glassing from the tripod which will hone their game finding abilities for situations with low game numbers or limited game movement. At this point game is at it’s peak of movement and you should be glassing as fast as you can effectively find game, making movements just slowly enough to see animals, while covering as much country as possible.

When animals are feeding or watering, they are still up and moving, but movements aren’t as fast as they are in transition from feeding to bedding. Animals are typically more exposed because good feed typically comes from more open country, but the rate at which they move slows. The slowing of the animal’s mass movements means their steps are smaller and head movements become more confined, accordingly the pace at which we glass needs to be slowed as well.

When bedded, animals are at their most limited movement of the day. Now identifying movements may simply be a deer twitching its ear because a fly is bugging it, a small, quick turn of the head to see something moving, or chewing their cud. While animals will re-bed to maintain their protection from or exposure to the sun, it is an occurrence that happens at a slow pace, and in a brief time window. Occasionally, you will luck out and an animal will be silhouetted and easy to find, but the majority of the bedded animals found will be in the shade or tucked into brush. The characteristics you register in your mind during periods of greater movement will begin to pay off significantly during bedding times. Over time the number of bedded animals you find will increase, up to the point that you discover mid day glassing is as effective as glassing during periods of high game activity.

As you can see, game movements vary throughout the day, as an effective glasser the rate at which you glass will correlate to the pace at which animals move, and will vary throughout the day. Adjust your glassing rate to what you are actually seeing; simply slow your glassing until you being finding animals. This will be a useful tool for the rest of your hunting career, as it better informs you of game movements, which will eventually play into the planning of stalks as well as where and how you look for animals in the future. Understanding the rate that animals move is an important part of the establishment of good glassing mechanics, and as you hone your technique, the results will become more and more significant over time.

We have been building a strong glassing foundation, in the next post we will dive into the mechanics of how to glass: picking terrain features and determining the most effective ways to glass according to specific country. Following that, we will dip into picking a good glassing spot.

A Hunting Tripod

What I call a tripod here is actually a combination of three elements: tripod legs, a tripod head, and a binocular adaptor. The kind of tripod legs, head and adaptor you set up with will likely affect your success.

Starting with the adapter, you need a way to mount optics as rigidly as possible to the tripod head to prevent any play when the face comes into contact with the binoculars – little things like this will drive you nuts when you spend significant time behind the glasses – and it’s a nice bonus when your expensive binoculars don’t topple off the tripod unannounced.

The tripod head – the piece that facilitates clean, fluid movement is an investment, it should be rugged in order to deal with the hunting environment while being precise enough to enable repeatable movements. Having fluid movements is key; jerky stop-and-go movements will actually make you seasick, so spend an extra hundred bucks to ensure your next few years of glassing will be productive and enjoyable.

Tripod legs come in a wide array of weights and sizes and all offer their own strengths and weaknesses. Lightweight tripods sacrifice the stability and durability that is inherent with heavier tripods. There is a balance to be pursued here, as weight goes up, features tend to increase. The key tripod features that should be sought are the ability to change heads and legs that can be adjusted to multiple angles, most quality tripods offering these features, and the lighter units that meet these requirements are generally great for hunting. Having the ability to change heads is more of a screening feature than one that deals with actual function, better tripods are generally sold as legs alone so the user may pick a head that caters to their specific need where tripods with fixed heads are typically a price pointed units for a beginning user. Adjustable leg angles are key. The ability to sit under the tripod as apposed to behind it ensures long-term comfort and comfort translates into more effective glassing times and the ability to glass longer, both of which produce more game. Next, the tripod needs to be tall enough to at least sit under it comfortably, taller tripods are convenient for glassing near the truck or in tall brush but additional height translates to additional weight; the first tripod you purchase needs to be one that you are willing to carry. The big tripod is typically the second purchase, while glassing from a standing position decreases the stability inherent with seated glassing, in some cases tall brush dictates you either have to stand, or get really creative in finding a glassing spot.

When you actually find yourself in and optics shop, or on the phone with them these few pieces will allow you to sort out the wide array of tripods into the few units that really perform in a hunting atmosphere. Now you can do yourself a favor, and shorten the search as there are two outfits that will be able to really dial you in; The Outdoorsmans, www.outdoorsmans.com has been in the game for a long time and is a specialty retailer dealing with all the goodies that pertain to optics hunting, I have been using their tripod for over seven years and it's been a constant companion. Unidaptor, 928-635-5316, owned by Jim White is also a great resource, Jim sells a wide array of optics and adapters that will help get you out on the right foot when it comes to tripod glassing, I have been using Jim's pan head for as long as I have had my Outdoorsmans tripod, and it to has been a reliable companion on many hunts. On the next post we will be discussing the tempo of game movements and the rate at which we should glass to maximize the results.