The first weekend in October marks the start of the mule deer hunting season in Oregon - a 12 day season in which you're allowed 1 buck. For the second year in a row, we were invited back to hunt mule deer on our friend Kelly Laugle's family ranch in north-central OR - a stretch of high, dry range land along the John Day River, just east of Wasco. They farm a lot of wheat out there, but these days, the biggest "crop" appears to be wind -- everywhere you look, you see giant windmills spinning. Kelly's great aunt Millie, who owns the ranch, doesn't have any on her property yet, but more than 20 are slated to be erected this coming spring. As we drove out toward the ranch on Friday night, it felt like we were driving around a giant airport, with the red lights of each windmill blinking in unison along the horizon.Jack, Kelly, Nate and I left from Portland around 5pm to make the 2 hour drive to Wasco. After one last calorie-laden meal at the Goose Pit Saloon in Wasco, where we met Kelly's dad, Tom, and her brother Neal, we all headed out to the ranch to set up camp at the "Rock-pit" - literally, an acre-sized pit dug out of a small hillside....the benefits of a slight wind-break outweigh the costs of sleeping on gravel!
We were up at 5:30am on Saturday morning to begin the weekend hunt by first light. Neal and Tom know the ranch well and have names for all the different areas: Four-corners, The Horseshoe, The Dickman tract, The Ross Field, The Shop Draw, The Point....To the outsider, it looks like one giant landscape of brown fields and hills, but when you start walking around the property, you find massive canyons, thick draws full of sagebrush and rabbit bush, canyon rim rock that looks fit for only mountain goats, and beautiful views of the river valley far, far below. On a clear day, from a high spot, you can see see both Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams (WA) looming in the far distance with their snow-covered peaks.
Kelly and I were along for every hunt, as two extra pairs of eyes. Every clump of sagebrush looks like a potential deer, so binoculars are a must. At one point, we spotted a large dark object making its way across a wheat field - for its size, we thought it might be a person, or a small truck? It was an elk - a male with a beautiful rack, just meandering along the field. We laughed to think that it might know it was mule deer season, so decided to take a walk and see where the action was...
The Saturday afternoon hunt proved to be a productive one. Neal and Tom decided we should hunt the Shop Draw - a long and fairly shallow canyon with a lot of sagebrush cover, so named because it ends at the ranch shop, a dilapidated metal shed. The plan was that Tom would stay up at the shop and the rest of us would walk to the end of the draw along the high field edge, then head down the hillside and walk back up the draw. It was a beautiful afternoon with moderate winds that would be in our favor as we walked back up the draw. After we got past the "Guzzler" - a watering station near the edge of Millie's property, we started to walk down the hillside - Kelly and I behind and slightly to the left of Nate, Jack and Neal. All of a sudden, Kelly stopped - "deer! get down!". ..I saw them right away, too and as we found them in our binoculars, we saw that there were 4 antlered bucks, standing in a tight group low on the opposite canyon. All the guys were looking higher and as we quickly tried to describe their location, the deer perked up and started to move slowly to the right. The guys found them, but hesitated - still not knowing who would take the first shot (which was sure to startle all four bucks into a full run). In the end, all three guys focused on one buck but no one is sure whose shot made the first good hit out of many that were fired; Kelly's brother Neal made a second and the deer dropped a short distance later. It was a beautiful 9 point (5x4 as they'd say in OR) buck, estimated at 200-220 lbs before field dressing. A lot of good meat to share, for sure!
Beyond the many deer and the lone elk, we also saw a lot of other wildlife - coyote, Golden Eagle, Pheasant, Chuckar, Hungarian Partridge, Western Meadowlark, American Pipet, and a Bald Eagle over the Columbia River on our drive home.
