My buddy Mark is what I’d call a lazy hunter. It’s not that he’s hesitant to bomb off a rimrock ledge into the canyon below, or that he’ll balk at packing 100 pounds of meat and cape across the steepest terrain. I call him lazy because he only finds mule deer where he expects to.
I’m betting you know folks like Mark. When they post up behind their binoculars or a spotting scope, they look in only the most obvious places, those sun-splashed grassy slopes where you could see a buck with your naked eyes. They don’t spend the time “digging out” animals from the hard spots—the dark shadows of a steep canyon or the shade of doghair timber—despite the fact that old and wary mule deer lurk in just those inscrutable places.
That’s largely because Mark is impatient, eager to get on with the most active phases of a hunt—the stalking and killing parts. But the spotting portion of any spot-and-stalk hunt is equally important, and when it comes to public-land mule deer, I’d argue
