flags

I grew up hunting hunting mulies, I've hunted whitetails and I've hunted blacktails. Of the 3, a really big blacktail is the hardest of all of them to get. When you talk about whitetails and mulies, I'd like to point out that some really good whitetails come out of some pretty rugged country in Idaho, Montana, Washington etc... and I have personally seen whitetails over by Kremmling. Additionally altitude, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily make a hunt any harder than any other type of topography. Every habitat has its own unique challenges and must be looked at in that context.

When hunting high, you can sit and glass and let your optics save you a lot of walking. In heavy timber, that isn't possible. Of all the deer hunting I've done, hunting whitetails in the river bottoms of the FL panhandle was the hardest type of deer hunting I've found. The cover is horribly thick, you had to watch out for cottonmouths, diamondbacks and alligators. It is hot and humid, bloodsucking bugs are thick, the deer are spread thinly and it is nearly impossible to use a treestand. The only way to hunt them is to get into the brush and root them out. You will be wet, muddy, skeeter bit, scratched, hot, tired and unsuccessful most of the time. When and if you do get a buck it will probably be no bigger than a 3x3 (the soil is mineral poor and big antlers ain't gonna happen), weigh around 120 lbs live weight and you will value him highly.

Besides, a lot of the very biggest mulies coming out of Colorado are not coming from the high country at all. The plains of CO, WY, NE, and KS all have a lot of huge mule deer bucks. I've seen some monsters out in the counties of Yuma, Weld, Logan, Kit Carson, Phillips etc... feeding in corn fields and alfala fields. Matter of fact, it I wanted a real big mule deer I'd be looking in the prairie and not the high country.

Bucks like this are on the prairies waiting for the man who knows how to hunt. By the way, this is a NE buck.