On day 3 we decided to head down the mountain range another 15 miles and to get a little farther away from the main roads. Having never been in Arizona before, we didn’t know what to expect as far as the conditions of the roads. We headed back the dirt road after traveling about an hour from the house. The road seemed smooth for the first 3 miles, until we started gaining some elevation. We hit some pretty sharp switchbacks, and snow packed sections of the road. I felt like we were probably going to have some issues getting back out the road if the temperature were to rise and melt some of the snow, thawing out the roads a little. We made it back to the trail head parking lot almost 7 miles off the main road and at about 3800 feet elevation. There was a truck already parked back there with three guys loading up to head out on foot. I jumped out of the truck greeted them and asked if they were from around the area. The one guy motioned to the driver and said “he;s from around here”  The driver let us know sternly he was an outfitter, he didn’t seem to thrilled we were back there. He asked us how we found the area and if we knew anyone from the area. We told him it was just a lucky guess doing some digging online. We asked if they had any luck seeing rutting bucks, since we had not so much as seen a mule deer doe or an antler on any of the deer we had seen. He told us the name of the mountain they were hunting around the day before and that they had seen some Mule deer over there rutting with some does. We jokingly told the outfitter that if they had some success that day we might be giving him a call to find us some mule deer. They headed south on a marked trail and we headed north on to some ridge tops.

We walked the road about a half a mile down to a dry creek bottom to cross over to a hill side. We climbed for a while to get to the top of a hill that seemed to have a long ridge line and branched off to a couple other ridge lines so we wouldn’t have to drop down and back up ridges all day. We kicked a coues doe out on the way up the hill so we were excited about this spot. When we got to the ridge line we made it about 100 yards before I saw another doe on a hillside staring at us. We held tight for a few moments glassing that doe, and scanning the surrounding area to see if there were any other deer within sight. We quickly saw 2 more doe feeding on the hillside, they took off over a ridge and down into what looked like a bowl on the map. In front of us about 150 yards was a doe feeding on the hillside, she was directly in the path we wanted to take. We didn’t want to completely run her out of the area, but we didn’t have another way around her that we could see. After watching her for a few minutes and realizing she didn’t want to move on her own we started slowly heading toward her. Justin took this moment to put on a practice stalk. He slowly moved closer to her, first up to 80 yards before stopping, then 55 then up to 37 yards. He stopped on the hillside and just sat there watching her, she didn’t seem to care at all that we were in the area. Eventually I think the wind swirled and she got our scent and took off.

We pushed up the hill further to an area where multiple drainage’s converged into one semi open area, with a dry creek bed that seemed to extend the whole way down to the hard road. We dropped down to a good glassing spot and set up our binos and spotting scope on tripods and got into a comfortable position so we could glass for the morning. The sun was just coming up over the mountains across the valley from us so we had a few hours ahead of us to glass. We started seeing does right away, darting in and out of the brush then disappearing. The desert whitetail has a way of just appearing and disappearing without trace on the landscape. After about 30 minutes of sitting, Justin spotted our first buck. A nice coues buck at 350 yards was headed towards the creek bottom. Looking through the spotting scope he appeared to be an 8 point buck, we both agreed he looked to be a nice buck. He didn’t stop in the open at all, he just kept moving through the thick brush. At one point we thought he was going to come our way, the wind wasn’t good so if he kept moving we were going to have to back out and get in better position. He changed course and walked down to the creek. We lost him in the brush. Justin assumed he bedded down in some thick stuff, but we just couldn’t tell.

About 5 minutes after we last saw the buck Justin made the suggestion that one of us stay in the glassing spot and one of us attempt to stalk up to where the buck was last seen. I lost the deer well before he did and while he walked me in to where he last saw him, I wasn’t 100% where the exact spot was that he saw him go into. I passed up the chance he offered and told him to go ahead and make the stalk if he felt like he could get into position to get a shot on the deer. We quickly discussed a quick hand signal code out between the two of us. I bought an orange shooter towel, about the size of a wash cloth, before we headed out west. I’d use the towel to flag him down if I needed to relay a message to him.  If he looked up and didn’t see a towel being waved, that mean all was good and he was to continue on with the stalk. I waited for about 45 minutes to an hour before he got to a place where I could see him after he descended the ridge we were on. It was apparently more difficult than he had anticipated. I watched as he slowly approached the area that the deer was last seen going into, he got to within about 100 yards. The brush thick, it was over his head and at times he would disappear into it then reappear again as if he was mimicking the coues deer. After a half hour of him trying to get different angles on this one particular area so that he could close the distance to less than 100 yards, I finally saw him throw his hands up in defeat and make his way back to the ridge line.

 

 

 

 

By the time Justin got back up to the glassing position it was now approaching 11 a.m. the deer activity had dropped off drastically. We had 2 groups of does we were watching that were close to a mile away. They would appear and disappear at times, but were always fairly close to the same area. We decided to eat lunch then maybe take a walk to a higher ridge to see if we could get on any other deer. It seemed for the moment we had a good handle on what was in the valley we were looking at and we wouldn’t be far away if we wanted to head back down to there. So we ate, then took off back the ridge and down another finger connecting us to another ridge. We flushed a covey of quail out, to me it sounded like a helicopter taking off and scared me half to death. There were probably 20 birds in all and they were awesome to see. We went about a mile and traveled a couple hundred feet in elevation to get to the next spot. We were now looking higher up the same drainage we were just glassing. We had some better vantage points on what looked to be better habitat. It also looked much more difficult to get to if we did end up seeing a deer we wanted to go after. We stuck around there for another hour or two until we decided that this wasn’t mule deer country. Maybe they were lower down closer to the main roads. So we started our trek back to the truck.

When we returned to the truck we found a business card stuck in the door from the outfitter we had met that morning. We kind of laughed about it and wondered if they had success or if they just got tired of not seeing anything and took off. At this time of the day temperature had gotten up to about 45 degrees and the road looked to be a slushy mess. We put the truck in four wheel drive and in low gear to back track a few miles on the road until we got to better road conditions. The saguaro cactus started popping up more and more as we went lower and lower. The snow covered ground dissipated from the south facing slopes and we were closer to the high way. We pulled off the road and got our gear together. We had a few hours of daylight left and I looked at the topo map and saw a hill that had a few hundred feet of elevation gain to get us to a long ridge line that had plenty of ravines we could glass down. We started out strong, about halfway up I was loosing steam, the hill was steeper than I anticipated. I got to a bench about 3/4 of the way up the hill and was starting to really feel the affects of a days worth of hiking hills. I took a seat to rest and get some water while Justin continued on up the hill. After a 10 minute breather I met up with him, having a second wind I was ready to see if we could find some Mule deer. There was deer sign everywhere, judging from the size of the tracks they looked like there was more coues in the area. We finished the evening out on a ridge overlooking the entire valley. It was surreal watching the shadows casting longer and longer as the sun dropped behind the mountains.

We headed back down to the truck, tired, a little cold, and feeling defeated from not seeing any mule deer. We got back to the house and decided to look up the mountain the outfitter had mentioned that morning. It was a little closer than where we had been hunting and was across the valley from where we were hunting. The mountain itself was at a much higher elevation from what we had been hunting. It got us thinking maybe we were in the completely wrong area from where we should have been. So we quickly mapped out a rout to get up to that area and decided that’s where we would be headed on day 3.