Well, I got close (kind of) to a nice buck this year. Not huge but a shooter for my hunting area for sure. I took my 4 year old daughter with me, got her up early and we headed up to the hills after deer. Her and I had just got back to the truck from a hike and I spotted this 3 pt muley on this knob around 11:30am. He was 649 yards away when I saw him and he fed and bedded in this spot. I knew I couldn’t even try with her (she's a chatty little thing) with me so I hustled her back to Grandma’s in town and picked up my wife/hunting partner to go back up after him. He was gone by the time we got back up there but I still hiked out to the spot and looked around. It was super thick and tons of dried milkweed leaves everywhere, a stalk would be near impossible. Plus there is fresh bear scat so I was on the watch for Smokey in the heavy brush.
Sorry about the pictures, the first one is what my 11x zoom camera saw and I zoomed and cropped to get the close-ups as they are. I think it was a big 3-pt but may have been bigger, too hard to tell with only 10x Zeiss binos and a 14x Zeiss rifle-scope to try to judge him. Man I really need a spotting scope, but probably would have just been more reason to cry as he looks pretty good to me.
Here's what it looked like with the 11x zoom on my camera.
Here's zoomed way in digitally and cropped on the computer.
I think I'll go up there this next spring/summer and clear a path out to the knob so I can sneak out there next fall. Hopefully he'll be there again next year.