While their are endless amounts of things to consider when planning a DIY hunt their are some basics that need to be covered. They should probably be thought of well in advance and no two lists are ever going to be the same. I can attest to the planning process that we undertook coming from 28 hours away to an area we never hunted before in North East Wyoming. The fundamentals will remain the same, but the specifics can go on forever.

The first few things were probably the most difficult, and my time in the military taught me that their is always a solution to every problem, if you haven’t found it yet, you’re not working hard enough. Number one was transportation, we had planned on taking 6 guys out west, driving continuously until we arrived, stopping only for fuel. We all have reliable transportation, but trekking 1800 miles cross country and back is hard on any vehicle. Through watching youtube videos on other DIY hunters I realized that taking at least one cargo trailer was going to be a must. So that was going to add extra wear and tear on the vehicles. Matt has an almost brand new diesel ford pickup and was willing to take his truck if we wanted him to. My warranty on my 2011 Nissan Titan was almost up anyway and the other guys’ didn’t have crew cabs, or their truck needed too much work to take so I decided to take my truck as well. After changing the front brakes throwing some new front shocks on last minute she was ready to go.

The trailer idea came from the youtube channel The heart of hunting, they give a great tutorial on how they transformed a cargo trailer into a mobile hunting camp. This sort of knocked out two of the major concerns for me, sleeping arrangements and cargo space. While we would have two truck beds to fill up, you wouldn’t want anything back there while it was raining on the way out or back. I’ll do a follow up post on our trailer build, where we got it, and lessons learned.

The route out there I just google mapped the directions and studied where we could gain ground or shave some time off. Unfortunately google took us through the heart of Chicago on route I90. While this probably wouldn’t have been horrible, we had a few ‘over the road’ trucking friends that advised heavily against going through Chicago anytime past 6am. We had a back up plan to bypass Chicago by using route I80 to I39 which would bring us back on I90 after all the traffic. Other than that it was pretty much I90 the whole way there, we ended up staying a few miles off I90 once we got out there.

The food situation was fairly easy, some people pitched in and brought a pre-made dish that their spouse made, like a casserole, we took out a large 1 gallon can of spaghetti sauce with noodles. Someone let us borrow their six foot yeti cooler so we could have some sort of refrigeration. We had a crate of eggs someone else was able to acquire from a friend that has a lot of chickens. We had took along a small Coleman fold-able camping stove, and a turkey fryer with a propane tank. Todd generally takes charge of the cooking and for good reason, the rest of us suck at it. So he was able to lead that department, in getting a meal list together and making sure we had snacks, and everything else we needed.  The only thing left to do at that point was to figure out what kind of gear we’d need and how to actually hunt the animals we had tags for.