Great Hunt Preparations

One of the locals who will be hunting with us on Great Hunt 2011 and I went out to the farm yesterday to hang tree stands. We got out there around 10:30 and drove out to a convenient parking spot in the pasture, hung the first stand in a known-good spot, and then started scouting for the next spot. Until...

The skies opened. Not quite torrential downpour, but it was coming down. We scrambled under a nearby evergreen and waited for it to slacken a bit, and after ten minutes of steady rain we decided to make a beeline for the truck and lunch.

We sat in the truck and dried off and watched the rain, which stopped shortly thereafter. I decided I was still hungry so I ripped open one of the MREs I stash in the truck (and they're due to get rotated out anyways). If I was starving, it probably wouldn't be as bad, but the vegetarian penne pasta with sauce was pretty awful. I ate everything else, though.

Once we'd eaten and dried off a bit we headed out to hang a few more stands. We found a nice spot with a view of a field and a bit of the creek bottom below, and hung one there. A bit of trimming opened up the view nicely, and there's LOTS of sign around the area.

We went back by the first stand on the way to the truck and trimmed the branches there - as seen here, Greg got himself a nice piece of ash:

I had a rough spot in mind for the next stand, so we drove to that end of the pasture and dragged a ladder stand into the woods. A bit of up-and-down hiking later led us to a great spot overlooking a large clearing full of goldenrod and raspberry brambles with good open woods on either side. We set up the ladder stand - a balancing act in and of itself - and headed back to the truck.

That's when we discovered that the strap for the last stand is missing. Somewhere between my garage floor and the pasture, it disappeared. So be it. I'll go hang that stand during bow season so it's set for gun season and the Great Hunt.

One other thing of note. Greg snapped this picture of me as we hiked out of one spot:

Ignore the goofy-ass grin and compare it to this one, from the NRA show in May:

Apparently this "physical labor" shtick has something to it after all...