Hello…Shawn Flemming here from Jolly Roger Tackle making my first post over here on the other side of In Depth Outdoors. My Dad and I just returned from a quick trip to SE Montana so I thought I’d share a report.
We had elk/deer combo tags this year and spent a week chasing elk in the Little Belt Mountain Region of the Lewis and Clark National Forest near White Sulfur Springs in early November. After only seeing cows which we elected not to shoot, we came back empty handed and decided to head back out during Thanksgiving to see if we could fill our deer tags.
For this trip, we concentrated on a few areas in the Custer National Forest near Ashland, MT. This is a great area with hundreds of square miles of beautiful public land to hunt. In fact there are so many areas a guy can hunt it can get a little overwhelming deciding where to go. We only had 3 days to hunt so we picked three different areas to try. We put many miles on our boots and saw alot of deer, passing on a few smaller bucks. On Thanksgiving day I made a stalk on a big 5×5, but ran out of daylight before I could get close enough for a shot. Yesterday, I encountered a decent 4×3 and decided to take it. Attached below are a few pics including a self portrait taken with my camera tied to a tree with trail marking tape! As a Minnesota deer hunter who has always dragged deer out whole and taken them to a processor, this was my first experience de-bonning a deer in the field as dragging in this terrain is not an option (at least one that I wanted to entertain!). Thanks to a few YouTube videos I watched before the trip, I did pretty well for an amatuer field butcher as I packed it all out in one trip with my frame pack.
For those looking for a do it yourself western deer hunt, I would highly recomend Montana. What I love about it is you never know what’s lurking below that next ridge and you can really get back to places where the deer have seen very few, if any people. There are alot bigger bucks out there and I can’t wait to go back (just need more time to find a wall mounter next time!)
Shawn Flemming
Jolly Roger Tackle
http://www.jollyrogertackle.com
Welcome to this side of IDO 
